George Rodrigue (American/Louisiana, 1944-2013), "Down Main Street", 1988, oil on canvas, signed lower left, signed, titled and dated en verso, inscribed on stretcher, 24 in. x 36 in., framed. Note: As a young artist returning to Louisiana from art school in Los Angeles in 1967, George Rodrigue visited the New Orleans Museum of Art to study the great American masters, both those of the Hudson River School and those who had worked closer to home in the style of the Barbizon School such as Richard Clague, William Henry Buck and Joseph Meeker. To Rodrigue, none of these artists captured the look or spirit of his Louisiana, so he determined to forge a new path in one of the most traditional genres of painting - the landscape. He raised the horizon line, cropped the oak trees so the light shined from underneath the moss and branches and defined the tree’s distinctive shape with hard edges. In doing so, Rodrigue created his own graphic visual interpretation of Louisiana that he would continue to explore and refine over the next forty years.The work offered here was created in 1988, an exciting period in Rodrigue’s career with the early beginnings of the Blue Dog series and a commission by the Republican National Party for an official portrait of Ronald Reagan. While many of his Cajun paintings depict figures glowing in white against the dark oaks, this work instead features a quintet of cows set within the artist’s masterful and fully realized oak trees. On Rodrigue’s canvas, the most quintessential of subjects - a landscape with cows – becomes something entirely new and utterly charming. Ref.: Rodrigue, Wendy. “Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989.” Musings of an Artist’s Wife. Oct. 19, 2009. www.legacyarttour.org. Accessed Aug. 9, 2022.

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