Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 45)

{Pip’s Place, Hopedale, La., between 1965 and 1979} laden trees executed in deep greens and browns. Cabins, fences and animals are arranged across the composition, often with diagonally placed pathways or waterways, boats, or fallen trees. This compositional layout persists in the works of Clague’s best-known disciples, Marshall Joseph Smith Jr. and William Henry Buck, but Buck’s canvases are more luminous and warmer in tone. Other artists sought to capture the element of light, notably Joseph Rusling Meeker. While serving as a paymaster on a Union gunboat during the Civil War, Meeker sketched the Louisiana bayous. Home again in St. Louis, he worked from his sketches, capturing the thick growth of vegetation of cypress-lined bayous with fallen trees, hanging vines, and weathered cypress knees. A luminous sense of light pervades Meeker’s paintings, often depicted in vertical formats. Joseph Jefferson’s and Alexander John Drysdale’s near-monochromatic paintings are characterized by soft lighting and a minimal use of diluted pigment applied in thin transparencies. by Laurence Christie Edwardson, oil on masonite The Historic New Orleans Collection, gift of Laura Simon Nelson A number of artists adhered to Clague’s compositional concepts into the 1920s, including Andres Molinary, Charles Lee Frank, and Adrienne Claude. Others explored lighter hues, especially Coulon, Everett B. D Julio, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Julio’s artistic production and his attempts to form an art organization were cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1879. Coulon’s gem-like compositions captured the lighter tints and hues of the land, especially blue skies reflected in water and hazy-gray atmospheric background effects. Artist-newspaperman Thomas Bangs Thorpe, a Massachusetts native who championed the cause of Louisiana artists, portrayed the rolling hills of northern Louisiana in his 1875 landscape with cows fording a stream, which he rendered in lighter tones. Thorpe’s contribution to Louisiana came though his military service under General Benjamin F. Butler, who appointed him to direct the rebuilding of the levee system and dredging of the Mississippi River. Further impact on southern culture came Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 45

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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