A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 37)

ALEXANDRE DE BATZ b. 1685, Montaterre, Picardy, France d. 1759, Fort de Chartres, Illinois Country Desseins de Sauvages de Plusieurs Nations, 1735 Mixed media on paper; 12 x 18 in. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Signing the 1733 marriage register at St. Louis Cathedral as “Engineer to the King,” architect, draftsman, artist, and engineer Alexandre de Batz was already years into a process that is his greatest legacy: creating the earliest known views of Native Americans in the lower Mississippi Valley. Based on sketches rendered while surveying French colonial inventories and the Native-American villages existing just outside New Orleans, De Batz portrayed in watercolor Tunica Chief Bride le Bouefs, appearing in warpaint and holding scalps. His other Louisiana subjects, beyond the assignment to document New Orleans’ architecture, included the Colapissa, Choctaw, and Natchez tribes. De Batz was sent to Mobile in 1735 and returned to New Orleans in 1740 before being shipped to what French colonists called the Illinois Country (a region largely east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio rivers) after the French decimation of Native Americans in the Beaver Wars. There he worked as an engineer and architect at Fort de Chartres. LEH COLONIAL THROUGH ANTEBELLUM LOUISIANA 37  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1202 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=1202

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

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