A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 25)

assessment: “Bernard’s best work is in the sophisticated manner of the French salon, combining a very lush and painterly image with the newly emerging strain of realism.” The rising popularity of landscape painting in the northeastern United States came slowly to Louisiana, though a few landscape painters were working in the state shortly after Louisiana statehood. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, most wealthy Louisianians were more interested in having their likenesses and wealth rendered in portraits than they were in paintings of watery marshes and wooded landscapes that would entrance later generations of painters. Wealthier patrons, especially in New Orleans and along the river, did purchase imported copies of master works found in leading European museums. During this period the true expression of the visual arts in major southern cities such as New Orleans was in architecture, not painting. “Certainly for this time in the South, architecture was queen of the arts,” wrote Jessie Poesch in her superb 1983 study The Art of the Old South, “providing the outward form of the symbols of state, religion, and home. If men and women knew little or nothing of the visual arts, they still probably knew something of architecture and building.” As a side note to architectural art in Louisiana, the New Orleans Notarial Archives, created in 1867, contains a collection of more than five thousand watercolor paintings of house and building plans dating from 1806 to the late 1800s. These detailed and exquisite paintings of townhouses, factories, bank buildings, West Indian-style plantation houses, tombs, churches, and homes are invaluable historical resources for studying eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Louisiana vernacular architecture. The collection reflects the evolution of building styles from Creole cottages in the city’s earliest faubourgs (suburbs) to the rich Greek Revival and Italianate townhouses in the New Orleans Garden District. “It’s absolutely unique,” wrote Mills B. Lane, author of the book series Architecture of the Old South. “There’s nothing like it anywhere in the South. Absolutely nothing.” New Orleans art historian Marylou Christovich once described the collection as “a mother lode of architectural renderings by the city’s finest surveyors, architects, and artists.” One of the most important of these architectural artists was Marie Adrien Persac, who drew and painted a significant number of these watercolor elevations. Active in New Orleans from 1857 to 1872, he is best known today for his collaged paintings of Louisiana plantation houses and his 1858 engraving Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River by A. Persac, which has come to be known as the “Persac Map.” To create this monumental and historic work, Persac traveled the length of the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, noting the names and boundaries of each plantation along the way. Also popular during the mid-nineteenth century were bird’s eye views of major American cities. Rendered by American and European artists, they reflected the wealth and commercial muscle of the nation’s growing cities. The three most important aerial views of New Orleans, the South’s largest city, were Thomas Muller’s 1851 lithograph Nouvelle-Orléans, Vue Prise d’Algiers (New Orleans, as seen from Algiers) and John William Hill and Benjamin F. Smith’s 1852 lithograph New Orleans from St. Patrick’s Church. Here viewers see the grand sweep of the city from the American Sector (today’s Central Business District) downriver to the French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny. That same year, Hill and Smith executed New Orleans From The Lower Cotton Press that gave a magnificent upriver view of the New Orleans riverfront and harbor from Faubourg Marigny to the American Sector. Landscape painting, though, did have its presence in early antebellum Louisiana. Perhaps the earliest landscape painter in New Orleans was Toussaint François Bigot from France. Art historians place him here as early as 1816. Others, such as the English artist Thomas Addison Richards, the Irish-born painter Robert Brammer, and the French artists Louis Dominique Grandjean Develle and Hippolyte Sebron, would follow. Develle, best known for his magnificent cityscape French Market and Red Store, and Seborn, for his Steamboats on the Mississippi at New Orleans, were among the growing school of artists devoted to nature and realism. During this time, agricultural Louisiana was more interested in the trappings of commerce and wealth than in the midnineteenth century philosophical and romantic movements that glorified nature and the American landscape. Many painters and writers, especially in the northeastern United States, rebelled against the abuses of the Industrial Revolution to find redemption and beauty in nature. The most important of these artists— Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt—made up the so-called Hudson River School of art that would create America’s most historic landscapes. Even here, American artists drew inspiration from the Barbizon School of painting that had found great favor in England and France from the 1830s to 1870s. This type of painting became immensely popular in Louisiana in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially among young artists arriving in New Orleans after the Civil War. Here they explored bayous and rivers to capture the warm, humid sunlight as it played on dark, forbidding and watery landscapes. The area was unlike any they had known. Equally important, they found a market for their work as Louisianians became more attuned to the changing world of art in Europe and northeastern states. The earliest and most important artist of this genre to work in Louisiana arrived during the Civil War as a paymaster on a Union gunboat. John Rusling Meeker, steeped in the tradition of the English painter J.W.M. Turner and John Constable, was a masterful painter of light and the Louisiana landscape in a romantic style that would become known as Luminism. Others to follow in this and the Barbizon traditions in the latter half of COLONIAL THROUGH ANTEBELLUM LOUISIANA 25 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1339 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1218 http://knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1239 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1339 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1331

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

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