Bayou Plaquemines

Joseph Rusling Meeker first visited Louisiana as a Union Navy paymaster during the Civil War, and was immediately captivated by its dense and tangled swamplands. Louisiana’s landscape struck Meeker as utterly unlike the Northeastern forests and mountains he had studied with his teacher Asher Brown Durand, and he made an exhaustive study of Louisiana’s landscape while traveling through the region. Although he spent little time in Louisiana, Meeker would return to the preparatory drawings and sketches he made in the state throughout his career. As he wrote in his journal, “The sketches and studies I made during the four years I spent in the South are sufficient to last me for forty years…and I shall see to it that their freshness and beauty does not fade away.” Meeker produced a large body of Louisiana landscape paintings whose hazy, indistinct views challenged many of the conventions of American landscape painting of the time, and looked forward to future developments in modern art.