HEART OF LOUISIANA: Louisiana Landscape

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – I fell in love with Louisiana’s beautiful landscapes years ago, and I’ve been fortunate to have spent years traveling along bayous through forests and back roads, capturing video and photographs of what I see.

Since I was a child, I’ve seen this painting of a winding road through the woods at sunset. First in my grandmother’s house, then my parents, and now in my home. There is unspoiled nature here. I noticed the large trees, the moss and wildflowers. It was painted in 1926 by my elderly great-great-grandmother, Eleanor Lewis, who lived in Loranger. She signed her initials and the date on the painting,

“I see a painter who’s trying to evoke a feeling, the feeling that the landscape gives to her. I love her dramatic use of lighting and capturing this kind of vibrant sunset here.”

Bradley Sumrall is the curator of collections at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The museum has a gallery of southern landscape paintings. When we look at something that was painted in the mid 19th century of a landscape, can we trust that that’s the way that it really looked? Or is there a lot of artistic license that goes into some of these?

“For the most part, painters were painting the reality of the landscape,” said Sumrall.

But these images of bayous, bays, forests, and seascapes have something else that you don’t always get from a photograph.

“A photograph depicts the world as it is, whereas a painting can depict the world as we truly feel it,” Sumrall said.

Sumrall pointed to this painting by Joseph Meeker of Bayou Plaquemine from 1881.

“People that are not from Louisiana, I think they see that landscape with the sky on fire and they think, well, he took artistic license. No sunset is like that. But if you’re from south Louisiana, you do know that we have those sunsets,” said Sumrall.

Those sunsets still exist. I’ve seen them throughout Louisiana, a fiery sky shining through moss and cypress trees reflecting in the water. But does this place still exist? The one seen by my great-great-grandmother Lewis.

I remembered seeing writing on the back before I added a new frame. Someone had written a location. Well, there it is. On the Tangipahoa River, west and north of Dunnington Bridge in the swampland. I found the bridge south of Loranger. And with the landowner’s permission walked through the woods where perhaps my ancestor was inspired by its beauty. As I walked, I found a large old tree that looked similar to one in the painting. And I have to wonder if this, this tree might have been here 99 years ago when my great-great-grandmother was walking through these woods.

For me, this large tree was a connection between a landscape and an artist. And I couldn’t help but think that Eleanor Lewis’s love of our state’s natural beauty, had somehow survived for four generations.

More Louisiana landscapes and places to visit can be found on Heart of Louisiana’s website.

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