American School/New Orleans, mid-19th c., "A New Orleans House and Grounds, probably on Esplanade Ridge", c. 1860, oil on canvas, unsigned, 19 3/4 in. x 24 1/2 in., in a giltwood frame. Note: This rare and arresting image shows an appealing blend of naïveté and sophistication. On the one hand, its discrepancies of figural scale are striking: the verandas of the outbuildings and the steps of the main house are painted in approximately the same plane, and thus roughly at an equal distance; yet the master and mistress behind the front railing are only half as tall as the corresponding figures in the lateral positions, and indeed they are smaller than the groom in the door of the stable building at the left, well behind the house. On the other hand the residence itself is depicted (albeit with an invisible roof) not only in the very latest fashion, but in many ways exceeding it. The ancestry of a two-story cubic block with superimposed, recessed central loggias goes back at least as far as Andrea Palladio, in his designs with single-bay "wings" of the Palazzo Antonini at Udine (1550), and Villas Cornaro at Piombino (1551) and Pisani at Montagnana (1552) - the latter being especially relevant in having only four columns, instead of six, displayed across the loggie. Inigo Jones's 1616 design for the Queen's House, Greenwich, again adds another pair of columns in the upper loggia (the only one recessed), and an extra window in the wings. The transition from that Palatine prototype to American civic architecture - and to this design in particular - was accomplished by Pierre Charles L'Enfant's remodeling of Federal Hall in New York (1789), the site of Washington's inauguration: again only the upper loggia is recessed, and the wings have two bays; but the four columns are set (as here) within the loggia, and strip pilasters bound the entire façade. The overall shape and proportions of this house are very closely prefigured in William Strickland's Belmont, near Nashville, of c. 1850, with the single excepti n that giant columns rise through both porches to the roof, as do also the bounding pilasters; but the wings have again only one bay, and the superimposed loggie have the depth of a full room. This last characteristic is reduced (again in the presence of giant columns and pilasters) in George Polk's house of the 1840s, at Oakwood Hall ("Rattle and Snap"), Maury County, TN; while the Junius Ward house of 1859 near Georgetown, KY, flattens out the façade, but for the first time divides its identical fenestration with exactly the paired columns in the syncopated rhythm that we see in this painting. An identical paired columniation (as square one-story shafts on two levels) stretches across the superimposed galleries of the house at 2257 Bayou Road, New Orleans - at the corner of Esplanade and Tonti - built in 1859 for Nicholas Benachi and Anna Marie Bidault, and purchased in 1886 by Peter Torre. In almost every way (but absent the superimposed, recessed porches) it is a virtually perfect prototype for this paint ng: its very deep lot of 540 feet would have provided ample room - in place of the school buildings documented there - for the depicted stables (a restored version of which survives behind the Leathers house of 1859, at 2027 Carondelet Street). The fountain in front still exists; and a small Creole cottage survives at 3330 Esplanade, absolutely identical to the two outbuildings in the foreground of the picture. Even the narrow waterway seems to be recalled by the Carondelet Canal in Tremé, widened in 1828, and filled in as Lafitte Avenue in 1917 An important clue to the anonymity of the Benachi-Torre house is provided by the complete documentation of the house built in the same year of 1859 for Cyprien Dufour (and owned between 1869 and 1912 by the Baldwin family) at 1707 Esplanade, a mere five blocks away. The great Henry Howard of Ireland (1818-1884) was the architect, and this was his "last great and elegant mansion" [Christovich, Evans and Toledano, New Orleans Architecture, vol. 5: The Esplanade Ridge, retna, 1977, pp. 89-92]. Once more the façade is in one plane, but the same superimposed columns, in the same proportions, march in syncopated pairs across both upper and lower galleries. If this "trademark motif" of Howard's were to be grafted onto the plan shared by Palladio, Jones, L'Enfant, and especially Strickland (which Howard could certainly have accomplished), the elevation depicted in the present painting would result. The nature of this picture seems mysterious: it could be an ideal view, rendering a proposed façade elevation from Howard's office in detail, perhaps following the popularity of the views of Marie-Adrien Persac (1823-1873), who was especially active in this same decade of the 1850s. It stands as one of the memorable images of Louisiana architecture and town planning on the very eve of the Civil War.