Jean Joseph Vaudechamp (French/Louisiana, 1790-1866) , "Portrait of Charles Jules Colheux de Longpré Fitzgerald (1823-1882) at 9 years old", 1832, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, "Turquin, Paris" label and labels with title and sitter information on stretcher, 25 3/4 in. x 21 1/2 in., framed. Note: Charles Jules Colheux de Longpré-Fitzgerald was born in New Orleans in 1823. His parents, Jean Baptiste Pierre Aimé Colheux Longpré (1775-c.1841) and Victoire Adèle Françoise Fitzgerald (1797-1832), were both French colonists in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Like many planters, they fled to New Orleans during the Haitian Revolution in 1804. In 2014, a rare manuscript copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, one of only a few in existence, was found among Jean-Baptiste’s papers in France and is now housed in the collection of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. After leaving Haiti and settling in New Orleans, Jean Baptiste and Victoire married in 1813 and welcomed their first child, daughter “Victoire” Ernestine Colheux de Longpré-Fitzgerald, in 1820. Charles Jules, depicted in the portrait offered here, was born three years later. To support his family, Jean Baptiste engaged in real estate speculation, primarily in the Faubourg Marigny and later lower Garden District, and he also owned a successful import and export business. Jean Joseph Vaudechamp’s first season in New Orleans as a portraitist coincided with the commission of this work. He painted a number of New Orleans’ prominent citizens during those first months and demonstrated a refined Neoclassical style of portraiture that, as William Keyse Rudolph wrote, set him apart from American artists. Vaudechamp became much in demand with city merchants and plantation owners along the Mississippi River. The compositional device of depicting the sitter looking out from a window frame in this portrait is perhaps an early experimentation on the part of the artist, as it is a presentation found in only one of his other attributed works. The cropping of the fictional window also hints at the possibility of a now unknown companion piece, perhaps depicting Charles Jules’ sister Victoire, in a matching window frame.Ref.: Rudolph, William K. Vaudechamp in New Orleans. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2007

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