Marie Adrien Persac - Louisiana Artist (Paperback)

Marie Adrien Persac (1823-1873) was a French-born Louisiana artist who worked in a range of mediums to produce a unique view of the lower Mississippi Valley at mid-century. In the first catalogued exhibition devoted solely to this multifaceted but overlooked talent, paintings, drawings, maps, and photographs from numerous holdings have been brought together for display beginning in the fall of 2000.

An artist, cartographer, architect, civil engineer, photographer, and art teacher, Persac immigrated to America in the early 1840s and spent most of his working life in New Orleans. While parts of his career remain a mystery, the essays and images in Marie Adrien Persac go far to correct misinformation, present fresh new insights, and place the regional artist in the context of nineteenth-century American art.

Of major importance are Persac's paintings of south Louisiana plantation houses, executed between 1857 and 1861. A medium of gouache on paper enabled the artist to capture that now-vanished lifestyle in minute detail, approximating the exactitude of architectural drafting. Among his cartographic works is the magnificent steel-engraved Norman's Chart of the Mississippi River, which provides boundaries and owners' names for all the plantations from Natchez to New Orleans and includes vignettes of Baton Rouge and New Orleans along with illustrations of sugar and cotton plantations. Also included are his drawings of properties in New Orleans, which are held at the New Orleans Notarial Archives, and his early 1870s Canal Street sketches in pencil, ink, and watercolor, which preserve a scene on the verge of significant change, just before a complete rebuilding of the area began.

Theexhibit "Marie Adrien Persac: Louisiana Artist" appears September 10-December 31, 2000 at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art and the LSU Libraries Special Collection as part of the celebration marking the Diamond Jubilee of the university's present campus in Baton Rouge. It then travels to the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter from January 15 to April 15, 2001. This rich and diversified collection of Persac's surviving oeuvre clearly warrants the artist's elevation to a much higher place in the annals of American history and material culture.