Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 44)

The earliest Louisiana landscapes were largely intimate documentary works with horizontal formats. {Path Through Palms, circa 1888 and 1912} by Louise Amelia Green Woodward, watercolor on paper The Historic New Orleans Collection 44 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08 other architectural structures in their landscape settings, often with collaged paper human figures and animals. In his 1847 Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou, Alfred Boisseau produced one of the earliest truly accomplished works placing Native Americans within their natural habitat, simply walking on a pathway beside a lush bayou. Boisseau exhibited the painting, which documents the Indians’ dress, weapons, and familial roles, at the 1848 Paris Salon. His fully developed painting contrasts with François Bernard’s circa 1860 oil sketch of a Mandeville Indian encampment nestled beneath a grove of trees arranged horizontally across the picture plane, with glimpses of sky and a suggestion of water through the trees. From 1857 to 1861, pioneer cameraman Jay Dearborn Edwards made the first known paper photographs of New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana landscape. Others used the camera to assist in their studio work, including Richard Clague, George David Coulon, and Charles Giroux. Clague, who established the Louisiana landscape tradition, was uniquely positioned in Paris after the Revolution of 1848 when the established art academies and the public appreciated pure landscape painting without narrative and historical subjects. Clague became influenced by the plein air painters of the Barbizon School, ideas he introduced into Louisiana. Previous to Clague’s arrival in New Orleans, artists’ survived by painting theater sets or European scenes, which attracted patrons desiring a part of the Old World. In 1841, Antoine Mondelli recorded the port of New Orleans, a view that became available through prints. Mondelli, his son-in-law Léon Pomarède, and Victor Hippolyte Sebron painted panoramas of the Mississippi River, which found audiences from New Orleans to the Midwest. Clague, who studied with Pomarède, documented the Egyptian landscape during an 1856 to 1857 expedition seeking the source of the Nile. Directing his attention to the Louisiana landscape, Clague favored the southern rural areas, especially St. Tammany Parish north of Lake Pontchartrain. His horizontal formats feature mostly clear skies and moss-

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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