John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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lean Spaniards, black negroes & negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly & straight-haired, quarteroons of all shades, long haired & frizzled, the women dressed in the most flaring yellow & scarlet gowns, the men capped & hatted.”27
To his credit, Latrobe took the time to look closely into other areas of New Orleans society, peering into all corners of the local culture and taking care to describe the different ethnic and racial groups that made the city so special. He liked the white women he saw at a fancy ball, for instance, writing appreciatively of their unpainted faces: “A few of them are perfect, and a great majority are far above the mere agreeable.… I could not see one face that had the slightest tinge of rouge.”28 In addition to looking into the polite entertainments of New Orleans’s elite, Latrobe also took in the sights of the more vigorous outdoor dancing among the city’s other major population, the people of color, hundreds of whom assembled each Sunday—the slaves’ one day off—for a weekly festival of expressive celebration. Place Publique (or what was more commonly, albeit unofficially, called Congo Square) became the site of an open-air market and meeting place, where people of African descent rejoiced in their cultural heritage through dance and song. The city authorities often looked fearfully askance at such a large congregation of black people, and they occasionally tried to outlaw, or at least regulate, the jubilant gathering. Other white people came to the site as curious spectators to look on from the fringes, and Latrobe soon became one of them.
Like most white observers, Latrobe probably did not fully comprehend the cultural significance of everything he saw, but as a modern historian of slave culture in the city has noted, “His account is probably the best, most thorough observation available from the heyday at Congo Square.”29 Latrobe wrote that he happened to stumble on the gathering by accident while out for a walk one Sunday afternoon, when he “heard a most extraordinary noise” and discovered that it came from some “5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square.” Making a quick estimation of the racial identities involved, he noted that “all those who were engaged in the business seemed to be blacks. I did not observe a dozen yellow faces.” He did observe the dancing men and women formed in circles, moving to music made by two drums and a stringed instrument, but he didn’t completely appreciate what he saw: “A man sung an uncouth song … & the women screamed a detestable burthen on one single note.… I have never seen anything more brutally savage, and at the same time dull & stupid, than this whole exhibition.” Latrobe might have noted that there was nothing more “brutally savage” than slavery itself, but he failed to make that connection. Still, he concluded, rather charitably and even credulously, that there “was not the least disorder among the crowd, nor do I learn on enquiry, that these weekly meetings of the negroes have ever produced any mischief.”30
Latrobe took a dimmer and essentially dismissive view of New Orleans’s Native American population, mostly Choctaws, whom he saw as “outcasts, the fag end of the tribe, the selvage, the intermediate existence between annihilation & savage vigor.” After going through an exceedingly unflattering description of their appearance and behaviors—dirty and drunk, he said, “having strings of birds, squirrels, perhaps a raccoon or opossum, often ducks, which they either sell to the hucksters in the market or hawk about the streets”—he nonetheless found something positive to say about them: “They are most scrupulously honest. No theft of any kind has ever been charged to them, & their women are most scrupulously chaste.”31
Latrobe was an architect, after all, not an anthropologist, and the point of considering his account here is not its accurate understanding, or even appreciation, of different cultures. Rather, his extensive and inquisitive exploration of New Orleans society, however biased or wrongheaded it may have been, still offers a standard of comparison for Audubon’s own observations, which came just two years later. Audubon seemed considerably less interested and even less impressed; he certainly had less to say about the many textures of society in the city. Where Latrobe spent page after page on his perceptions of different cultures and customs in this remarkably diverse city, Audubon said what he had to say in less than two.
Like Latrobe, Audubon commented on the energetic scene he found in the Sunday morning market, “crowded by people of all Sorts as well as Colors, the Market, very aboundant, the Church Bells ringing the Billiard Balls knocking … the day was beautifull and the crowd Increased considerably.” But immediately, in the next sentence, Audubon lost interest in the female part of the crowd, saying that “I saw however no handsome Woman and the Citron hue of allmost all is very disgusting to one who Likes the rosy Yankee or English Cheeks.” Later in the day, he did see “some White Ladies and Good Looking ones,” but he begged off going to the “quartroon Ball … as it cost 1$ Entrance I Merely Listened a Short time to the Noise.”32 With that almost offhand expression of disdain toward women of color and apparent indifference to the lively entertainments they could provide, he essentially ceased further discussion of the matter. His failure to look more deeply into New Orleans society in this written account of his initial 1821 visit seems striking, particularly given his later biographical association with the city and its surrounding region. For a man who would eventually even claim, less than fifteen years later, that his father had been “in the habit of visiting frequently … Louisiana” and had “married a lady of Spanish extraction” there, Audubon remained decidedly silent on the multicultural mix of New Orleans.33 Whatever its energy and diversity, New Orleans never became an especially happy place for Audubon. Poor, separated from his family, facing the unhappy prospect of somehow supporting himself, and always preferring to spend his time and talent on his own art, he spent most of his time there in a funk.
In the first few weeks, he also spent most of his time looking for work, and he soon found that the world of art didn’t offer much, certainly not in keeping with his artistic self-regard. When he had been in town for five days, he met “an Italian, painter at the Theatre,” who seemed to like his work, but all Audubon could get from the theater management was an insulting offer to “paint with Mons. L’Italian” for a hundred dollars a month. “I believe really now that my talents must be poor or the Country,” he grumbled. The following day he walked through the “Busling City where no one cares a fig for a Man in my Situation” to see John Wesley Jarvis, a local portraitist, but again the meeting amounted to nothing. Jarvis looked at some of Audubon’s bird paintings “but never said they Were good or bad.” When Audubon all but begged him for work as an artistic assistant, being willing to paint clothing and backgrounds and such, Jarvis proved at first evasive and then dismissive: “He very Simply told me he could not believe, that I might help him in the Least.” Over two months later, Audubon finally got an audience with John Vanderlyn, the eminent “Historical Painter,” who said some favorable words about Audubon’s color and composition but ultimately offered only the faintest praise, saying that Audubon’s works seemed “handsomely done”—hardly a forceful endorsement of Audubon’s art. “Are all Men of Talent fools and Rude purposely or Naturally?” Audubon wondered.34
Audubon’s fellow artists, “Men of Talent” or not, may have seemed nothing more than a source of discouragement, but women—white women in particular—became his artistic bread and butter. Throughout Audubon’s two years in Louisiana, he made ends meet by painting portraits and giving art lessons, quite often for the wives and daughters of prominent men. Early on in his stay in New Orleans, he made a deal with Roman Pamar, a local merchant, to paint Pamar’s three daughters. Audubon wanted twenty-five dollars apiece for head portraits, but Pamar wanted all three girls in one painting, so Audubon raised the rate to a hundred. To prove his skill, Audubon did a quick pencil sketch of one of the girls, Pamar liked what he saw, and he “Civilly told me that I Must do my Best for him and Left it to my self as to the Price.” Several weeks later, Audubon’s biggest and certainly most interesting commission came from a mysterious woman who accosted him on the street, asked him to do her portrait—full-length, and in the nude—and after more than a week of sociable posing, compensated him with the one form of payment Audubon might have preferred to cash, a top-of-the-line gun, worth $120. On another occasion, though, he did a portrait of the wife of a man “who Could Not spare Money” but offered only a woman’s saddle in payment, “a thing I had not the Least use for.” Still, a saddle seemed better than nothing,