A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 3)

lacks vast vistas and perspectives, but rather emphasizes the shortened sightlines cut off by bends of a meandering river or bayou and the interiority enforced by the dark canopies of live oaks and their encircling limbs. Thus, it is easy to imagine the fascination by artists across several centuries with the bayous and the aqueous quality of the light suffused through the humid air. The landscape and its indigenous wildlife were literally captured and evocatively preserved for posterity by numerous artists, but few immortalized it more beautifully than the early and monumental work of John James Audubon. From its founding as a French territory in 1699, and the formal establishment of New Orleans in 1718, through its long Spanish ownership and administration and the eventual acquisition by the Americans, Louisiana has experienced a very different political origin and range of cultural influences than the rest of the United States. Louisiana further defined itself in contradistinction to the rest of the country with the rise of les gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, amidst the surrounding economy supported by slavery, and the continuing cultural linkages to Haiti and France, and later by succeeding layers of immigration of Acadians, Canary Island Isleños, Germans, Croatians, Irish, and eventually Americans. The earliest works of art, in the colonial period, tended to document as their subjects the ethnographic encounter with the Native Americans and the gradual exploration and establishment of the Louisiana colony. Once the colony was firmly established, the art in the antebellum period evolved toward the documentation of families and their possessions, and also the accumulation of wealth and development of the civic sphere, not to mention major historic events such as the Battle of New Orleans and its heroes, namely General Andrew Jackson. President Jackson was rendered in the powerful and idiosyncratic portrait by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, painted during sittings on the occasion of the former president’s visit to New Orleans in 1840. In contrast to the largely English and classical architectural styles of colonial New England and the Atlantic coast states, the exoticism of New Orleans and many of South Louisiana’s towns was derived from French and Spanish influences, and the insistent retentions of African styles vividly expressed in worked iron and pyramid roof lines. In this human-built environment, the architecture reiterates and reinforces this interiority and sense of closure, by the enclosed courtyards and narrow streets of New Orleans’ Vieux Carré and the similarly constricted roads of the many towns that cling to the banks along the winding waterways of rivers and bayous. WILLIAM HENRY BUCK (b. 1840, Norway – d. 1888, New Orleans, Louisiana) Louisiana Pastoral: Bayou Bridge, ca. 1880 Oil on canvas; 26 x 40 in. Roger H. Ogden Collection INTRODUCTION 3  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=589 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=589 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=531 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1163

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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

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