Marshall Joseph Smith, Jr. (American/Louisiana, 1854-1923), "Bucolic Louisiana Farmstead with Moss-Draped Live Oaks", oil on canvas, signed lower left, 20 in. x 32 in., framed Provenance: Estates of Louis and Georgia Woodson, Lafayette, LA. Note: Marshall Joseph Smith, Jr. was among the most talented and preeminent painters of Louisiana bayou and swamp scenes of the late 19th century. While maintaining a studio in New Orleans, Smith traveled extensively throughout the rural isolated countryside of southern Louisiana, at the time accessible only by boat or horse. Smith's paintings reveal his intimate knowledge of the particulars of life in the rural Acadian communities.By contemporary accounts, Smith was a favorite student of the dean of Louisiana landscape painting, Richard Clague. Upon finishing his studies in art at Virginia's Washington College, Smith returned to New Orleans in 1869 and furthered his studies with Clague in his studio, and later during a Grand Tour of Europe. Smith's sensitive and masterful brushwork, subtle and effective use of color, and his ability to interpret and respond to the landscape in his own personal style made him a highly respected, exhibited and collected artist of his day.Of the three masters of Louisiana landscape paintings, Richard Clague, William Henry Buck and Marshall J. Smith, Jr., Smith was the least prolific. To appease his parents, Smith worked as a clerk and as an agent in his father's insurance company. Additionally, as a founding member of the Krewe of Proteus, he designed their annual Mardi Gras floats and tableaux. Smith's personal time to devote to traveling and painting his alluring and evocative Louisiana landscapes was limited, making his paintings particularly rare on the market today.In the large canvas offered here, Smith’s complex composition centers around an imposing moss-laden live oak tree which anchors a farmstead with barn and distant structures. The tree provides shade for the cows resting beneath it, while a companion cow is being tended by a girl in the foreground in a charming vignette with figure, trough and animal. The low horizon line provides space for an expansive sky with floating wispy clouds above the open fields. The combination of the rarity of Smith paintings, clear artistic expertise in brushwork, nostalgic historical quality of rural southern Louisiana life, as well as the magnitude in scale of “Bucolic Louisiana Farmstead with Moss-Draped Live Oaks” contribute to the importance and significance of this exceptional offering. Ref.: Poesch, Jessie. "Growth and Development of the Old South, 1830-1900." Painting in the South: 1564-1980. Richmond: Virginia Museum, 1983; Bacot, H. Parrott. Louisiana Art from the Roger Houston Ogden Collection. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1992; Pennington, Estill Curtis. Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in Southern Art. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 2000

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