Louisiana Landscape by Andres Molinary

Andres Molinary, a painter, art teacher, restorer, and photographer, worked in New Orleans from 1872 until his death in 1915. He was born in Gibraltar and was trained at the Fine Art Academy in Seville, Spain; Lucca’s Academy in Rome; and in East Africa and Morocco. He toured Italy, Spain, and Africa with artists Marino Fortuny and Reynold painting exotic and historic vistas.

Molinary’s travels led him to New Orleans where his uncle John Brunasso was a partner in an import company. With his uncle’s encouragement, he opened an art studio. A landscape and genre painter, Molinary reminisced about his beginnings as an artist and his evolution as a portrait painter.

I always liked it—always like to watch faces and sketch them, but it was until I came to New Orleans, that I devoted myself entirely to portrait painting, because it was the only field open to the artist. Before that I loved best studies of Egyptian life, street scenes—in East Africa and Morocco. It was a great thing in those days for young painters to go to Tangier and live. They had studios there. We were all crazy over color, the beautifully picturesque life.

An active leader and teacher in the New Orleans art community, Molinary helped found the Southern Art Union, the Cup and Saucer Club, and the Artists’ Association of New Orleans. His paintings were exhibited at the 1884-85 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans and were honored with a retrospective show at the Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art).

By the same artist:
Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miro