Signing the Ordinance of Secession of Louisiana, January 26, 1861 by Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.

Born in Boston, Enoch Wood Perry Jr. moved to New Orleans with his family as a teenager and was one of the first graduates of the city’s public schools. After working several years as a clerk in a commission house, Perry began formal art education. In 1852 he went to Europe for four years and studied with Emmanuel Leutze in Dusseldorf, Thomas Couture in Paris, and in Venice and Rome. Upon returning to America, he opened a studio in Philadelphia.

On the eve of the Civil War, Perry arrived in New Orleans, opened a studio, and painted three canvases that captured the political unrest of the South. In 1860 he was commissioned by "several gentlemen" of New Orleans to paint a life-size portrait of Louisiana United States Senator John Slidell, now in the collection of the Louisiana State Museum. When Louisiana seceded from the Union, Slidell resigned from his seat and was appointed the Confederacy’s minister to France. In 1861 Perry completed a portrait of Jefferson Davis posed before a map of the Confederacy, which was raffled off at a fair with the proceeds benefiting the southern war effort.

Signing the Ordinance of Secession of Louisiana is the unfinished oil sketch for a proposed life-size mural. This ambitious multi-figures composition, set inside the senate chambers of the state capitol in Baton Rouge, and commemorates the vote to secede. Perry depicted over one hundred legislators discussing and debating the issue. The painting’s lack of dramatic impact and the public’s preoccupation with the war may account for the failure to produce the full-scale work.