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The mystery of Julien Hudson

Art Review

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 30, 2011|By Sebastian Smee

Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait and Creole Boy With a Moth are included… (LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM…)

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.’’