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ON VIEW
EXHIBITION
Visions of a City: Printed Views of igth-Century New Orleans
Through August 15, 2015
Laura Simon Nelson Galleries for Louisiana Art, 400 Chartres Street
Free
A North Side, Canal St. between Royal and Bourbon in 1846
1846; lithograph by Jules Lion 1971.22
B. Exchange Alley, N.O.
between 1842 and 1873; lithograph by Marie Adrien Persac 1950.39
C Birds’ Eye View ofNew-Orleans
1851; hand-colored lithograph
by John Bachman
bequest of Richard Koch, 1971.54
D.	Explosion of the Louisiana
1849; lithograph by Giovanni Tolti 19 91.128
E.	A View of New Orleans Taken from the Plantation of Marigny
1803; aquatint with etching and watercolor
by John L. Boqueta de Woiseri
1958.42
Crescent Cityscapes
The Laura Simon Nelson Galleries showcase the role of printmaking in bringing New Orleans to the world.
The image of New Orleans as a complicated network of streets clustered into the Mississippi River’s crescent is well established today, often appearing in logos and other insignia of local pride, but such place-based branding was a rarity until somewhat recently. Before the advent of mass-media photography, the geological basis of the nickname “Crescent City” could only be seen in illustrations and maps. Visions of a City: Views of 19th-Century New Orleans, a new exhibition, highlights these early cityscapes and their role in bringing New Orleans to the rest of the country.
“People were interested in what major cities in the United States looked like, so during the mid-19th century, especially, there was a profusion of urban views, so that people could see what Chicago or Boston, New York or New Orleans looked like,” said the show’s curator, Director of Museum Programs John H. Lawrence.
Typically produced as engravings or lithographs, which could be colored by hand or imbued with color at the time of priming. the<e images were available for sale through subscription, published advertisements, or in retail settings like bookstores and stationers. As Lawrence explained, “Photography was in widespread use by the 1840s, but it was not disseminated yet in the way it is uxi^y. Photographs that could be reproduced economically and faithfully in print did not start to become commonplace until the turn of the century.”
Some of the images in Visicr-.j of m	bird’s-eye views—and not entirely faithful in
their representation. “The whole ide* ™ she 'exhibition] title, it’s descriptive in one sense, but it also suggests that in transiting the physical city into a dimensional image, it was not a direct transcription,* Ljts:civ.~ uid. *In some views, whole sections of Uptown are cut out in order to make th^ of the river fit the image. It was an artist’s convention to allow the salient point* *£ (he u_!s*n v—■» ,0 be included in a limited space.”
The exhibition also fc— arr» oneri vt*?, images of buildings, newsworthy images—such as the steamboat Louiazxeafu* a wif&red a massive explosion, in 1849—and decorative-arts objects that bear imag=s -< N-r»	“They’re all views of an urban setting, rather
than landscapes or peop*?-~ I-nurr— aid. —UOLLY REID
8 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly