Do you enjoy looking and pondering over a map? Does a historical map that shows the way things used to be, engage and captivate you? Evidently there are many people, some willing be pay a pretty penny, who find maps to be fascinating. Just last month, one of Adrien Persac’s 1858 maps, “Norman’s Chart”, detailing the locations of the antebellum plantations that lined the Mississippi River from Natchez to New Orleans, sold at Neal Auction Company for $197,000. That is quite a price considering, that although rare, there are numerous copies still in existence. Just shows you the power of the map.
With only one more week remaining, there are plenty of wonderful rare maps of Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to go see and examine in The Historic New Orleans Collections’ “The Threads of Memory: Spain and the United States/El Hilo de la Memoria: Espã̃na y los Estados Unidos.” The exhibition on the Spanish Colonial period will be on view only until this Sunday, July 10th at the THNOC’s 533 Royal Street location in the French Quarter. All the maps, documents and paintings, loaned from the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, have never been seen in America before and are on a limited three city tour, with the THNOC as the last host. The exhibition’s curator Falia González Diaz noted that “New Orleans is a key point in this exhibition, a perfect city for its closure.”
In addition, the first floor gallery has a delightful exhibition of Spanish Colonial art dating from as early as the mid seventeenth century in “The Golden Legend in the New World: Art of the Spanish Colonial Viceroyalties.” There is a charmingly naïve quality to these brightly colored and inventive paintings and sculptures, all on loan from the New Orleans Museum of Art. In one portrait of the Virgin Mary, she wears actual jewelry made up of small gems that were attached to the canvas around her neck and wrist. Although talented, these artists had little academic training and a limited understanding of European art which they would have been exposed to primarily through engravings. This allowed the artists a freedom and creativity that academic training can sometimes diminish.
Don’t miss this opportunity to experience these two exhibition, they are well worth the trip to the French Quarter.
The exhibitions “The Threads of Memory: Spain and the United States/El Hilo de la Memoria: Espã̃na y los Estados Unidos” and “The Golden Legend in the New World: Art of the Spanish Colonial Viceroyalties” are on view at The Historic New Orleans Collections, 533 Royal Street Gallery. The gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sunday from 10:30 am to 4:30 pm. Admission is free, but read the parking signs carefully, so that your car will be still be there when you return. For additional information, please contact THNOC at 504-523-4662 and www.hnoc.org.
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