Jacques Amans

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Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (1801-1888) was an American neoclassical portrait painter living in New Orleans in the 1840s and 1850s.

Born in Belgium, Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans was trained in the French neoclassical tradition of portraiture. He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1831 to 1837. News of fellow-artist Jean Joseph Vaudechamp’s good fortune in finding patrons probably led Amans to visit Louisiana since the two artists traveled on the same ship from France to New Orleans in about 1837. Following Vaudechamp’s departure from Louisiana in 1839, Amans assumed the role as the most celebrated portraitist in Louisiana. In the mid 1840s he married Marquerite Azoline Landreaux, the daughter of a St. Charles Parish sugar planter, and purchased Trinity Plantation on Bayou Lafourche. Amans and his wife moved back to France to 1856, never to return to Louisiana. He died in 1888.

[edit] His work

Clara Mazureau, whose portrait Amans painted when she was a young girl, was the daughter of Aimée Grima and Etienne Mazureau, Attorney General of Louisiana. Amans completed the portraits of several members of the Grima and Mazureau families in the 1840s. In this portrait Amans used his favored three quarter length pose. Influenced by the French neoclassical artists Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David, Amans emphasized meticulous draftsmanship and realism with particular attention to the sitter’s face and hands.

Among Amans' most famous subjects was President Andrew Jackson, who sat for his portrait in 1840 (the 25th Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans). The painting is rich in details of both physiogamy and surroundings shows an elderly, though not frail, former president.