Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827-1887)
1876
Oil on canvas
| Louisiana
Bayou Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827-1887) 1876 Oil on canvas |
|
| Born in
Newark, New Jersey, Joseph Meeker received a scholarship
to the National Academy of Design in New York City. There
he studied with the famed Hudson River School painter
Asher B. Durand and with portraitist Charles Loring
Elliott. During the Civil War, he traveled down the
Mississippi River, as a Union Navy paymaster. In addition
to fulfilling his military duties, he sketched and
studied the bayous and swamps of Louisiana. Meeker painted Louisiana Bayou while living in St. Louis, Missouri. There he did well financially as a painter of southern landscapes based largely on his drawings done in the military. This painting reflects Meeker’s work in the manner of luminsm during the 1870s and 1880s. Meeker used light and color to heighten emotional impact and captured the hazy atmosphere light in the swampy environment. Meeker’s paintings were influenced by the nineteenth century’s waning romanticism and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about eighteenth-century Acadian exiles, Evangeline. Meeker’s success encouraged him to produce prints of his landscapes. The Louisiana State Museum has an engraving of Meeker from 1879, Near Bayou La Fourche, Louisiana. |