The Portraiture of William Frye

William Frye was a quintessential itinerant portraitist working in the nineteenth-century South. A largely unknown name today, Frye was one of the most successful and prolific painters in Antebellum Alabama. Today, more than 140 of his works have been discovered, the majority of which exist in private collections. Because his paintings were primarily passed down …

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The Figures of Fashion

Changes in clothing reveal aspects about the lives of the people who wore them and the time periods in which they lived. Unfortunately, most clothing from past centuries has decomposed due to poor storage procedures, over use, or conflict. This issue has made the study of costume history difficult for many historians; however, portraits are …

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Posthumous Portraiture

  Death, dying, and the deceased has been an inspiration for artists and their patrons since antiquity forward. From morbidly memorialized martyred saints and heroes, to the Medieval obsession with “memento mori”, the subject matter falls in an out of trend through time. Early America was no stranger to this obsession with death. The American South …

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African American Grave Decoration

      African Americans have a long-standing tradition of grave decoration. As part of this burial custom, African Americans would decorate the dead’s grave with objects referred to as grave goods.[1] These assorted objects are placed on the graves in belief that they will honor and represent the spirit, protect the spirit, guide the …

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George Rodrigue- A Retrospective

George Rodrigue- a Retrospective Introduction: George Rodrigue is most known today as the artist of the Blue Dog. While Rodrigue gained fame and fortune for his Blue Dog works, the series that made him a name in the art world has overshadowed his earlier and perhaps more accomplished works. Rodrigue’s earlier evangelical and landscape paintings …

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J. N. B. de Pouilly in the Cemeteries of New Orleans

Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly had a profound impact on New Orleans architecture in the nineteenth century, and some of his most original, innovative contributions are funerary monuments that still stand in the city’s cemeteries today. Born in a small French village, he may have studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before arriving …

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Mark Catesby

Until the mid-eighteenth century, scientific illustration in America was limited, if not virtually non-existent. This all changed when British born naturalist, Mark Catesby, became the first to illustrate a widespread collection of plants and animals in America. Catesby became well known throughout Europe and America after his publication of Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and …

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Jean-Joseph Vaudechamp

Southerners tend to have a unique perspective on their cultural history, particularly when it comes to their view the Old South. Its legend is surrounded by nostalgia and sentiment, mixed with a certain longing for an idealized past that may have never truly existed. The most prominent examples of this romanticized version of the Old …

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Adrien Persac

Marie Adrien Persac: Louisiana Artist Marie Adrien Persac (1823-1873) was a Louisiana artist in the mid-nineteenth century. Persac is best known for his many surviving plantation landscapes, but Persac also painted many maps and multiple view of Canal Street in New Orleans. Persac signed most of his works as A. Persac, assuming he went by …

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