A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 20)

Like their free black counterparts, many gifted white were Germans and Irish. By 1860 almost 25,000 Irish resided in Louisianians also traveled to Europe to find success. Such was New Orleans. Many Germans remained in the city while others the case of Paul Morphy, the international chess champion, and moved further upriver. composers Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Ernest Guiraud. Yet, the most interesting segments of Louisiana’s population Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in 1829 and at the age of during the antebellum period, especially in New Orleans, were thirteen traveled to Paris to study music and eventually become the Creoles and the free people of color. Historians as well as a child prodigy in the Parisian music world. Before his death in travelers to the city often differed widely in their views and 1869 while on tour in Rio de Janeiro, Gottschalk had gained descriptions of the Creoles. Even the word “Creole” itself, and as considerable fame and acclaim in Europe and America for his it applies to Louisiana, has remained controversial and variable musical compositions, many of which, such as La Bamboula, over time. During the colonial period, it generally meant native were based on the music and dances he had heard and seen born. To early nineteenth century Americans, the word was slaves perform in Congo Square in New Orleans. Guiraud, born usually used to differentiate the descendants of old colonial in New Orleans in 1837, also went to Paris to study music. families of Louisiana from the new arrivals. During both periods, During his career in Europe, which spanned several however, French-speaking blacks and free people of color decades, Guiraud gained distinction for his operatic called themselves Creoles to distinguish them from compositions, won the Prix de Rome, and their English-speaking counterparts from other regions of the nation. became a teacher at the Paris Conservatory. Despite the artificial handicaps of race Perhaps Guiraud’s most long-lasting in Louisiana, les gens de couleur libres accomplishment was the music he (free people of color) contributed to wrote for portions of the famed the arts and letters with writers and opera, Carmen, after the death of poets such as Armand Lanusse its composer, Georges Bizet, and (1812-1867), editor of Les Cenelles completion of the unfinished (1845), the first anthology of poetry Tales of Hoffmann, when Jacques Offenbach died. by free people of color in America; poet Camille Thierry (1814-1875); Pierre Dalcour; and Victor Sejour THE VISUAL ARTS IN (1817-1874), a poet and novelist ANTEBELLUM LOUISIANA who enjoyed considerable literary success in Paris, especially work Antebellum New Orleans was with the Comedie-Francaise. Free unlike any other Southern city, people of color excelled in the visual especially in the visual arts. “For arts, and in some cases, gained most of the nineteenth century,” international reputations. Jules Lion wrote Randolph Delehanty in his was one of the city’s earliest lithographers book Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection (1996), “New and daguerreotypists. Without question, two Orleans was the largest and most of the city’s most talented sculptors during this cosmopolitan city in the South, with era were the Warburg brothers, Eugene many northern and European and Joseph Daniel. They were the sons GEORGE PETER ALEXANDER HEALY immigrants and a relatively precocious of Daniel Warburg, a member of the (b. 1813, Boston, Massachusetts – d. 1894, Chicago, Illinois) art and auction market. Roman Catholic important Jewish family of Hamburg, Jenny Lind, ca. 1850 Oil on canvas; 36 x 29 in. New Orleans, with its painted church Germany, and his slave mistress, MarieThe Historic New Orleans Collection Rose, a native of Santiago, Cuba. Warburg interiors and devotional images in freed her and she bore him five children. virtually every home, was peculiar to Eugene moved to Paris where he gained considerable fame the region. Church commissions in the Crescent City drew gifted Europeans to create artistic environments there, and the while his brother, Joseph Daniel, remained in New Orleans, long and deep tradition of Carnival masking and costuming, practicing his art. Perhaps Eugene’s most important work was another most ‘unsouthern’ practice, taught New Orleanians the the bust of U.S. Minister to France, John Young Mason, which potentially transforming power of symbols and the joys of Warburg sculpted in 1855. Joseph Daniel’s son, Daniel, also was communal art.” The same was true for much of south Louisiana an artist. The best example of his work is the carved column of the Holcome-Aiken monument in Metairie Cemetery. and Natchitoches and its environs in north Louisiana. The 20 COLONIAL THROUGH ANTEBELLUM LOUISIANA  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1157 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1157

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A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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