American/Southern School, c 1850-1860, 'View of a Garden District Villa in the Style of Architects Henry Howard or the elder Gallier, with Family and Servants in the Garden and Gallery', oil on canvas, unsigned, 28in x 32in E10000-20000 Note: Two vintage photographs of mid-19th c New Orleans mansions and their gardens, from viewpoints identical to this important image, are well known: one an 1870s view by George D Hopkins of the Joseph Carroll House (1315 First Street), with members of the family appearing on the galleries of the house with their Black servants (Historic New Orleans Collection); and a slightly later view of the former Miller-Elmer House on Coliseum Street, with the mistress of the house standing in the garden, and a small Black girl on the upper gallery (Mary Cable, Lost New Orleans, Boston, 1980, p 77) In those two albumen prints, as in this painting ( which is probably an expanded translation into paint of another such photographic prototype), all the figures stare fixedly at an upper- gallery-level point across the street, where each of the photographers has set up his tripod The fashionable urban villa in this painting is apparently lost; but its plan and elevation have striking points in common with James Gallier's 1844 house for William Newton Mercer, now the Boston Club (824 Canal Street), as well as'above all'with many comparable residences by Henry Howard: his 1858 Samuel Moody House ( 1411 Canal Street); Col Robert Henry Short's house of 1859 (1448 Fourth Street); and even a post-war villa as late as his 1874 George O Sweet House (1236 Jackson Avenue) Howard's magnificent Belle Grove Plantation (formerly Iberville Parish, 1853-1857), which first adumbrated his consistent treatment of this three-bay plan with a three-light bay on the left flank, also included (as here) a service structure beyond that side fa‡ade: two 1859 stable buildings, of forms extraordinarily similar to that in this painting, still stand as 'Picturesque' additions to the grounds of Howard's 1859 Thomas Leathers House (2027 Carondelet Street), as well as his Walter Robinson House (1415 Third Street) Even the pointed-arch Gothic windows, lighting the staff accommodations in this background building have exact New Orleans prototypes: the upper fa‡ade of the similarly utilitarian General Seafoods Building on Tchoupitoulas Street, attributed to Gallier (before 1849'), had these same forms, proportions, and raised arched borders (Autobiography, fig 35) This lost architectural masterwork is thus most likely to have been a design of Henry Howard's (as influenced by Gallier, his 1840s employer of the years immediately before or after the Civil War; the presumed intervening photograph may have preceded or been roughly coeval with that by Hopkins of the Carroll House; and this apparently local painter would probably have worked at about the same time.