Where land meets water: mindful of the recent catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina, this exhibition reminds viewers that the line of demarcation between Louisiana's land and water is vague and ever-changing

IT IS A PLACE that often seems unable to make up its mind whether it will be earth or water, and so it compromises. The result is that much of moist lower Louisiana belongs to neither element. The line of demarcation is vague and forever shifting. The distinction between degrees of well-soaked ground is academic except to one who steps upon what looks like soil but finds it is something less.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While American landscape painting essentially begins around 1825 with Thomas Cole and other artists of the Hudson River School who celebrated the vastness of this developing nation in canvases describing the drama and grandeur of the land, the earliest Louisiana landscapes largely were intimate documentary works with horizontal formats. French artists Charles Alexander LeSeuer, Toussaint Francois Bigot, and Charles Lesseps and engineers Marie Hyacinthe Laclotte and Adrien Marie Persac recorded the land and architecture. In his representation of the "Battle of New Orleans" (1815), Laclotte documented battle positions placed within the context of the landscape of St. Bernard Parish, in what now is called Chalmette Battlefield. Persac delineated numerous plantations and other architectural structures in his landscape settings, often with collaged paper human figures and animals.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

In "Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou" (1847), Alfred Boisseau produced one of the earliest truly accomplished works placing Native Americans within their natural habitat, simply walking on a pathway beside a lush bayou. Boisseau exhibited the painting, which documents the Indians' dress, weapons, and familial roles, at the Paris Salon of 1848. His fully developed painting contrasts with Francois Bernard's oil sketch (c. 1860) of a Mandeville Indian encampment nestled beneath a grove of trees arranged horizontally across the picture plane, with glimpses of sky and a suggestion of water through the trees.

From 1857-61, pioneer cameraman Jay Dearborn Edwards made the first known paper photographs of New Orleans and the surrounding landscape. Others used photo images to assist in their studio work, including Richard Clague, George David Coulon, and Charles Giroux. Clague, who established the Louisiana landscape tradition, uniquely was positioned in Paris after the Revolution of 1848 when the established art academies and the public appreciated pure landscape painting without narrative and historical subjects. Clague became influenced by the plein air painters of the Barbizon School, ideas he introduced into Louisiana.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Previous to Clague's arrival in New Orleans, artists survived by painting theater sets or European scenes, which attracted patrons desiring a part of the Old World. In 1841, Antoine Mondelli recorded the port of New Orleans, a view that became available through prints. Mondelli, his son-in-law Leon Pomarede, and Victor Hippolyte Sebron painted panoramas of the Mississippi River; these found audiences from New Orleans to the Midwest.

Clague, who studied with Pomarede, documented the Egyptian landscape during an 1856-57 expedition seeking the source of the Nile. Directing his attention to the Louisiana landscape, Clague favored the southern rural areas, especially St. Tammany Parish north of Lake Pontchartrain. His horizontal formats feature mostly clear skies and moss-laden trees executed in deep greens and browns. Cabins, fences, and animals are arranged across the composition, often with diagonally placed pathways or waterways, boats, or fallen trees. This compositional layout persists in the works of Clague's best-known disciples, Marshall Joseph Smith Jr. and William Henry Buck, but Buck's canvases are more luminous and warmer in tone.

Other artists sought to capture the element of light, notably Joseph Rusling Meeker. While serving as a paymaster on a Union gunboat during the Civil War, Meeker sketched the Louisiana bayous. Home again in St. Louis, he worked from his sketches, capturing the thick growth of vegetation of cypress-lined bayous with fallen trees, hanging vines, and weathered cypress knees. A luminous sense of light pervades Meeker's paintings, often depicted in vertical formats. Joseph Jefferson's and Alexander John Drysdale's near-monochromatic paintings are characterized by soft lighting and a minimal use of diluted pigment applied in thin transparencies.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

A number of artists adhered to Clague's compositional concepts into the 1920s, including Andres Molinary, Charles Lee Frank, and Adrienne Claude. Others explored lighter hues, especially Coulon, Everett B.D. Julio, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Julio's artistic production and his attempts to form an art organization were cut short by his death from tuberculosis in 1879. Coulon's gem-like compositions captured the lighter tints and hues of the land, especially blue skies reflected in water and hazy-gray atmospheric background effects.

Thorpe, an artist-newspaperman from Massachusetts who championed the cause of Louisiana artists, portrayed the rolling hills of northern Louisiana in his 1875 landscape with cows fording a stream, which he rendered in lighter tones. Thorpe's contribution to Louisiana came though his military service under Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, who appointed him to direct the rebuilding of the levee system and dredging of the Mississippi River. Further impact on southern culture came through Thorpe ' s The Big Bear of Arkansas and other books on Southwestern humor (so-called because Louisiana's borders demarcated the Old Southwest). These books influenced writers like William Faulkner.