PERSAC, Marie Adrien (French-American, 1823-1873). Clifty Falls, Indiana.

PERSAC, Marie Adrien (French-American, 1823-1873)
[Clifty Falls, Indiana]
Gouache on paper
Signed A. Persac (lower right); inscribed Chute de Clifty (Indiana) /Etats Unis d’Amérique / (Clifty Falls) (on the reverse)
13 1/4” x 9 3/8” framed

Marie Adrien Persac (1823-1873) was a photographer, architect, artist, and civil engineer. Born in Lyons, France, he came to the United States to hunt buffalo and settled in Indiana to cultivate apple orchards. It’s not clear what brought Adrien down south to Louisiana. Letters with his marriage proposal show him to be a highly educated Frenchman. His wife was just 16 when they married. She lived on the Daigre Plantation, which Adrien later immortalized when he painted. They started their married life in Baton Rouge and later moved to New Orleans. The couple had three sons: Marie Adrien Edouard, Octave Joseph, and Alfred.

Persac had a background in engineering and drew property maps for the Notarial Archives in New Orleans. He was also an accomplished artist and lithographer. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Persac made some topographical gouache drawings of plantation houses in Louisiana on commission or, reportedly, as barter for room and board. He also briefly operated a photographic studio in the 1850s with William G. Vail. In 1869, he founded his own Academy of Drawing and Painting, where Persac taught portraiture and landscape painting in oil and watercolors. He died in Manchac, Louisiana.