Marie Adrien Persac (b. France 1823, d. Manchac, Louisiana 1873, active New Orleans 1857-1872), Star Plantation, St. Charles, La., c. 1861, gouache on paper, signed A. Persac New Orleans lower right, sight 17.5in. x 33.5in. E75000/100000 Provenance: Descended in the family of Achille Bougere of Star Plantation. Note: Chauvin, Levois & Co. Star Plantation is shown on Father Paret's 1858 map of St. Charles Parish. P.A. Champomier's Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in Louisiana 1859-1860 reflects that Chauvin, Levois & Bougere produced 377 hogsheads of sugar that year. Star Plantation is now the site of the Union Carbide Star Plant. The multi-talented Marie Adrien Persac emigrated from France in the early nineteenth century and worked as an architect, civil engineer, cartographer, photographer and artist. In 1859 Persac found employment as a painter documenting real estate transactions at the Notarial Archives in New Orleans. Persac's finest and highly prized paintings are the series of watercolors and gouaches he did of the plantation homes along the lower Mississippi River and Louisiana bayous. The largest Persac gouache painting now known to exist, Star Plantation gives a panoramic perspective of antebellum life on a sugar plantation in southern Louisiana. Persac captures the activities and buildings that made up life on the plantation. Behind the raised American Gothic plantation house is a row of raised slave cabins. The large brick sugar mill with the star insignia and overseer's house are meticulously depicted. In the left foreground, there is a small lumber mill, with a worker chopping down trees and another fishing wood out of the river. Members of the Bougere family populate the painting and can be seen on horseback, strolling in the grove of live oaks and on the staircase of the plantation home. After the comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue to Marie Adrien Persac: Louisiana Artist organized by The Historic New Orleans Collection and Louisiana State University Museum of Art in 2000, this rare painting Star Plantation was discovered. Ref: Bacot, H. Parrott, Marie Adrien Persac: Louisiana Artist, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2000.