Description:

Marie Adrien Persac (French, 1823-1873, act. Louisiana 1851-1873), "Capriccio of a Louisiana Landscape with Bayou and Figures", c. 1851-1873, gouache on paper, signed "A. Persac" lower center, 5 1/8 in. x 6 7/8 in., framed Published [presumably, as one of a group still remaining in France; see below]: H. Parrott Bacot, et alia, Marie Adrien Persac, Louisiana Artist, Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 2000, pages 6-7. On 15 July 1856 Persac advertised with his then partner William G. Vail, in the Baton Rouge Daily Advocate, announcing their recent opening of a Daguerreotype studio: Their rooms are tastefully decorated by many charming views from the pencil and brush of Mr. Persac. In his definitive monograph of 2000 on the artist, H. Parrott Bacot notes that the ‘charming views’ cited in the advertisement were doubtless small watercolor, gouache, and pen-and-ink sketches Bacot continues, This group of paintings includes two southern landscapes (as indicated by moss-draped trees) These watercolors appear to have been executed over a broad period between [1856 in Baton Rouge] and [c.] 1867 in New Orleans, since two are labeled with an address at 130 Canal Street where Persac worked in the mid-1860s. (It might further be noted that Persac won prize competitions for exactly comparable works in New Orleans in 1867, 1869, 1870, and 1871, and that he presented at least one such work as well at an exhibition in France in 1868.) Bacot concludes his biographical essay with the observation that a third-generation descendant of Adrien’s older brother, Marie-Amédée, has no less than seven Louisiana landscapes done by Adrien (still in France): the present sheet is very possibly one from that group. Persac’s few published works have concentrated on some two dozen large panoramic views of south Louisiana plantation houses and their grounds, all executed between c. 1852 (at the earliest) or (more probably) 1857, and 1861: almost all were dated by the artist, and all are larger than the present drawing. All, without exception, are painted as rectangles. Indeed, the conspicuous oval shape immediately distinguishes this composition: it is emphatically not the portrait of a place (like the artist’s precise rectangular renderings); but rather a more imaginative recombination of ‘Acadian’ motifs, suggestively brought together to evoke a familiar landscape. Of its elements that are repeated in the dated drawings, the most striking is the short Y-shaped tree exactly at the center: precisely the same tree is seen in Persac’s rendering of Bois de Flèche Plantation, dated 1861. The pirogue is again present in Persac’s view of Albania Plantation, once more dated 1861; the buildings are approximated in his early image of Daigre House (of the 1850s), while the chickens are repeated in some half-dozen of his topographical views, executed between 1857 and 1861. (On the other hand, the very prominent pigs, uniquely appropriate to this riparian landscape, are decisively distinguished from Persac’s many renderings of sheep on plantation lawns, as for example in his images of Manchac [1857], Hope [1859], or Magnolia [1861].) Ref.: H. Parrott Bacot, et alia, Marie Adrien Persac, Louisiana Artist, Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 2000; Barbara SoRelle Bacot, Marie Adrien Persac; Architect, Artist, and Engineer, in The Magazine Antiques (November 1991), pp. 806-815; John A. Mahé II and Rosanne McCaffrey, Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 1718-1918, New Orleans, THNOC, 1987, pp. 299-301; John Wilton-Ely, Capriccio, in The Grove Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner, ed., 34 vols, London, 1996, vol. 5, pp. 685-688.

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November 21, 2015 10:00 AM CST
New Orleans, LA, US

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