Richard Clague, Jr. (American-New Orleans, 1821-1873), "Life on the Farm: St. Tammany Parish", oil on canvas, signed "R. Clague" en verso of stretcher, 18 in. x 22 in., in a period gilt frame with interior felt liner. E80000-120000 Provenance: Estate of the artist, to his cousin Auguste de Brueys Hughes. Note: This is an important recent discovery of a Louisiana landscape by "the father of Louisiana landscape painting", New Orleans artist Richard Clague. In 1974, the New Orleans Museum of Art mounted an exhibition on Clague, revealing in its catalogue that Auguste de Brueys Hughes, the artist's cousin, had inherited the contents of Clague's New Orleans studio and transported them to New York in 1873. This is the first known painting from the transfer to come to light, and it was discovered in New York along with a signed drawing. The artist's mother, of a prominent French Creole family, Justine de la Roche, had a sister Josephine, who married Francois Desiree de Brueys. Richard Clague, Jr. was close to his cousins, especially Henri Clement de Brueys, with whom he lived in New Orleans intermittently from 1862 to 1867. Clague was buried in the de Brueys' family tomb at St. Louis Cemetery #2. His first cousin, once removed, was the attorney Auguste de Brueys Hughes, who worked in New York. The artist's father, Richard Clague, a successful financier who bankrolled the Americans in the Battle of New Orleans), was a native of England, arriving in New Orleans from the Isle of Man. He made his fortune in shipping, the cotton export business and merchandising his imports in New Orleans where he became a close friend of General Andrew Jackson during the period around the Battle of New Orleans. His son, though, was Creole in all aspects because of his mother and her distinguished Creole family. French was his native tongue and he was educated in France and French Switzerland from the age of fifteen. Clague studied with Francois-Edouard Picot and at the ateliers of Horace Vernet and Ernest Herbert, but his debt is to Theodore Rousseau and the Barbizon and Fontainebleau groups with whom he painted naturalistic landscapes in the plein aire style. He lived in Paris, where he was an artiste photographe in the 1850s until he joined an expedition to Egypt in 1856-1857. Upon his return from Egypt with a large portfolio of drawings, he sailed for New Orleans where he lived the rest of his life except for a stint in the Confederate army. His compositions, like the one presented here, often feature water in the foreground, wedging toward a horizontal screen of oak trees in the central mass, usually with a vernacular building below an expanse of sky. This landscape with Negro figures in a humid, South Louisiana setting, may have been painted just before the Civil War, when he opened his studio in New Orleans, because the women are wearing tignons, headpieces that were prescribed by Louisiana Law for free women of color, or after he resigned his commission in the Confederate Army in 1862. Clague used techniques and discoveries of the French Barbizon artists, applying them to the landscape of the Mississippi River Delta region, as well as the forests and swamps of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. He taught and influenced other Southern landscape painters, especially Marshall Smith, Jr. and William Buck. His successful career was recognized in 1911 when Clague's name was included with those of twenty-three other distinguished and well-known American artists on the frieze of the classical-revival museum building donated to New Orleans by Isaac Delgado. Clague's name is inscribed high in the entablature along with "Gilbert Stuart, George Inness and Winslow Homer", (for example). Perhaps Mr. Delgado himself selected the names. Roulhac Toledano, author of Richard Clague, 1821- 1873, 1974 The discovery of this important painting was first announced in The Catalogue of Antiques and Fine Arts, volume 7, issue 4, January-February 2007, p.16 Neal Auction Company is indebted to Ms. Toledano for her assistance in the preparation of this catalogue entry.