Portrait of a Free Woman of Color

Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, German-born artist François Fleischbein immigrated to New Orleans to paint portraits that reflected the city’s great cultural diversity. The Free Woman of Color pictured here was part of a dynamic, multi-racial culture in New Orleans in which people of color often had significant rights and freedoms, especially when compared to the rest of the United States. The portrait’s simplicity and naturalism reflected new trends in European art of the time, and the portrait’s sitter likely regarded the painting’s straightforward artistic style as a mark of worldliness and sophistication. The portrait also reflects the influence of photography: Like many portrait painters of the time, Fleischbein was also a photographer, and opened a gallery specializing in daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in the Marigny in the 1850s.