The mystery of Julien Hudson
Art Review
Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait and Creole Boy With a Moth are included… (LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM (LEFT); Fodera Fine Art Conservation Ltd.)
WORCESTER - In 1911, Rudolph Lucien Desdunes, the son of free people of color, wrote a history of colored people who had made important contributions to his New Orleans community. It was called “Nos hommes et notre histoire (Our People and Our History),’’ and it drew not only on written records but on collective memory.
In the book, Desdunes described a painter called “Alexandre Pickhil’’ in a way that has piqued the interests and excitement of art historians ever since. Read what he said, and you will see why:
“We had our Titian in Louisiana in the person of Alexandre Pickhil. We know that Pickhil produced magnificent pictures, but he has left us nothing as a legacy, perhaps because he became disillusioned. He is said to have executed a full-length portrait of an eminent ecclesiastic, but he destroyed this masterpiece because of vicious criticism upon it. Thus, although Pickhil may have been the best painter of his era, he preferred to die in misery and anonymity rather than display his talent to the detriment of his self-respect. . . . It is said that disillusionment cast a cloud of despair over his whole life.’’
A Titian in Louisiana? One who - presumably because of his race - was sidelined, vilified, and driven to despair? In the history of race relations in this country, it’s explosive stuff.
Yet after Desdunes’s book was published, subsequent commentators were quick to realize that the artist he was referring to was not, in fact, Alexandre Pickhil (no such person existed) but Julien Hudson, a free artist of color whose nickname was “Pickil.’’
Hudson’s story - what little was known of it - was picked up, and by the 1930s, historians had started assigning him a definite racial identity. In Ben Earl Looney’s “Historical Sketch of Art in Louisiana’’ (1935) he was “a negro.’’
Even more intriguingly, a portrait of a man that was undoubtedly by Hudson’s hand was described in a newspaper review in 1938 as a self-portrait. The reviewer, Ethel Hutson, claimed that the subject, whose skin is light and eyes are blue, “shows pronounced Jewish as well as Negroid characters.’’
There is nothing in the historical record to substantiate Hutson’s claims, as William Keyse Rudolph points out in an essay in the catalog that accompanies a deeply fascinating exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, “In Search of Julien Hudson, Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans.’’
But her claim stuck. And in subsequent decades, as first the Harlem Renaissance and then the civil rights movement stimulated a gush of attempts at documenting the cultural contributions of African-Americans, the portrait - now deemed a self-portrait - appeared in a slew of authoritative studies of African-American history. Among these were books such as James A. Porter’s “Modern Negro Art’’ (1943) and Arna Bontemp’s “Story of the Negro’’ (1948), and such groundbreaking exhibitions as “American Self-Portraits, 1670-1973’’ (1974), “Two Centuries of Black American Art’’ (1976), and “Selections of Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Art’’ (1976).
Those three shows were at, respectively, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. By the time of the Met show, the Hudson portrait had entered the historical record not just as a self-portrait but as “the earliest known portrait of an Afro-American artist’’ by “the earliest documented professional Afro-American painter in the South.’’A very important picture, in other words.
The Worcester Art Museum’s show includes this painting, although it wisely acknowledges the paucity of evidence for its status as a self-portrait by labeling it “Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait.’’ It also includes Hudson’s five other extant works, as well as two that have been tentatively attributed to him, though with scant evidence to confirm it.
All in all, the show and its terrific catalog do a neat job of puncturing the mythology that has built up around Hudson and the peculiarly compelling portrait he painted. But it replaces it with a much juicier, more substantial picture of the artist in his context.
The exhibition, which has come to Worcester after stints at The Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., is well worth a visit. It has three rooms. The first is devoted primarily to Hudson’s teachers; the second to Hudson himself, and the third to his competitors and peers, some of them artists of color.
All this gives us a sense not only of Hudson - who remains frustratingly elusive - but of New Orleans between 1810 and 1840, as its population exploded and it emerged as the crucial transportation hub of the south.
Hudson, we know, was the son of Desirée Marcos, a property-owning free woman of color, and John Thomas Hudson, an English merchant, ironmonger, and ship chandler. Marcos seems to have been a formidable woman. She had 13 children by five different men. She was, writes Patricia Brady in another catalog essay, “fiercely protective of her children, financially savvy, and willing to go to court to protect her interests.’’
Hudson was Marcos’s firstborn. After a brief spell as a tailor’s apprentice in the mid-1820s, he decided to pursue a career in painting. The decision sounds like no big deal, until you register that he was the first native-born portraitist to practice in New Orleans, and only the second documented painter of African-American descent in the United States.
His first teacher in New Orleans was an itinerant Roman called Antonio Meucci. Meucci painted miniature portraits, and kept busy by retouching damaged works, painting opera scenery, and teaching. Three of his miniatures are included here, and they are nothing if not charming.In 1831, Hudson traveled to Paris. After studying back in New Orleans with the German-born François Fleischbein, he went to Paris again in 1837, this time to study with the well-known artist Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol.
When he came back, New Orleans was suffering from an economic slump, and Hudson presumably struggled to find patrons. Only three portraits from this period are known.
He died in 1844, at the age of 33. Again, as with so many aspects of his life, we don’t know how he died, although the possibility he committed suicide is floated in the catalog.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the show is the insight it gives into the status of free people of color in New Orleans during these pre-Civil War years. By 1830, free people of color made up a quarter of the city’s population, and more than a third of its free population.
They constituted an intermediate caste between the enslaved population and the free whites. Their position was precarious, but they had many advantages - both legal and economic - and great mobility (as evidenced by Hudson’s two trips to Paris).
Nonetheless, restrictions were placed on where they could live. They were expected to show deference to former masters, and free women of color had to wear a tignon, or head scarf, to indicate their status.
After the Civil War, in many ways their position worsened. From then on blacks were blacks and whites were whites, and the intermediate category - free people of color - ceased to exist.
The show’s third room contains some marvelous works, including a series of lithograph portraits by Jules Lion, an artist of mixed Afro-European ancestry.
As for Hudson’s own work, it’s safe to say that he was no Titian. The “Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait’’ was his most accomplished effort. His other portraits, though not without interest (his “Portrait of a Black Man’’ is awkward but certainly memorable), reveal a very limited artist. With further time and training, he may have developed. He was, after all, only young.
