General Interest, Members' Corner
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The Artist (Formerly) Known as Louis Rigaud
Over the course of a century, a nineteenth-century artist’s paintings traveled from Port-au-Prince to New Orleans to Washington to New Haven. His name stayed in the archives, waiting to be found.
From Lapham’s Quarterly:
“In 1963, Yale University’s Peabody Museum accessioned seventeen nineteenth-century portraits of Haitian revolutionaries, heads of state, and military figures from the United States National Museum, an entity of the Smithsonian. That same year, Saul H. Riesenberg, a curator of ethnology at the U.S. National Museum, wrote to Cornelius Osgood, curator of anthropology at the Peabody, that he “had not been able to learn anything about the painter, L. Rigaud,” whose signature appeared at the bottom of each painting. When Peabody staff later formally catalogued the paintings after five decades, they realized no one had learned much in the intervening years. Working with existing scholarship, however, staff at the Peabody came to believe the paintings were the work of Louis Rigaud.
“Yet while researching the life of the painter for a forthcoming exhibit of his works—which I am co-curating at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT, to open this fall—not only was I unable to find any record of a Haitian painter named Louis Rigaud, but I turned up a completely different name for the artist who came to be known (erroneously) as Louis.”
[…]
Read Essay on Lapham’s Quarterly
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