Mission
The La Farge Restoration Fund (“The Fund”) is dedicated to preserving a singular American artistic achievement—John La Farge’s 1880-81 comprehensive decoration of the Newport Congregational Church’s sanctuary in Newport, Rhode Island. An installation like none of La Farge’s other works, the sanctuary wall and ceiling murals and decorative windows, made mostly of opalescent glass, are largely intact today. In this modest brownstone Lombard Romanesque style church designed by New York architect Joseph C. Wells (1814-1860) and completed in 1857, La Farge (1835-1910) had a unique opportunity to re-imagine an entire space and to create all the elements of one magnificent personal vision. He had a first chance to model his 1880-patented invention—opalescent glass—in the church windows and experimented with pigment in his murals of Middle Eastern-inspired motifs. La Farge crafted, in the words of Art Historian Ron Onorato, “a highly elaborate ensemble of color and light.”
The La Farge Restoration Fund, founded in 1995 and holding title to the former Newport Congregational Church since 2011, is pledged to restore the artwork to the artist’s original intent and to steward the former sanctuary’s adaptive reuse. This important mission makes this National Historic Landmark part of another vision, that of a dynamic, vital City of Newport that builds on its past and its many historic structures and stories to create a new community for a new century.
The La Farge Restoration Fund is doing its part, not only with its restoration focus, but also for economic development. As the restoration phases are underway, walking this path during construction and site upheavals are artists and other creative entrepreneurs. Not just project artisans but Newport artists based in nine work space studios in the adjoining former parish hall (1907), presently serving as the La Farge Arts Center.
Finally, as a 501(c)3 charitable and education organization and the interim steward of this National Historic Landmark, the Fund embraces its role to make the sanctuary available to the public and the scholarly community, so that both may more fully experience and appreciate La Farge’s achievement.
National Historic Landmark Status
Newport Congregational Church was awarded National Historic Landmark status on October 16, 2012 by the National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior. About 2500 sites throughout the United States and its territories have achieved this prestigious status. In the words of the NPS’s guidelines, National Historic Landmark sites must show “exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.”
The Fund is grateful for generous support bestowed by the Alletta Morris McBean Charitable Trust, the van Beuren Charitable Foundation, Ocean State Charities Trust , the 1772 Foundation, the Felicia Fund, the Rhode Island Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission and the RISCA Cultural Facilities grants
image credits
View of the Sanctuary facing East from the organ loft; John La Farge original opalescent glass window at Newport Congregational Church. All images courtesy of Aaron Usher, Photographer.