The Art of Erasure
Detail of Portrait of Betsy by François Fleischbein, 1837 (Image courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection).
On a lovely humidity-free winter’s day in New Orleans, I walked into the Williams Research Center at the Historic New Orleans Collection for the first time. As an art history graduate student at Tulane, I came to investigate a nineteenth-century portrait that everyone at the HNOC referred to as “Betsy.” All who worked there knew her name, most knew her story.
The portrait presents a young woman conservatively dressed in a shapeless black ensemble sporting elegant adornments—earrings and a brooch made of silver, diamonds, and pearls, a bold gold tignon, or headwrap, complimented by a voluminous lace ruff collar fastened with a yellow bow. All expensive accessories, lace in particular was often limited (legally and financially out of reach for most Black women) to the white elite. The portrait makes apparent the sitter’s beauty, wealth, and status, proclaiming her agency within a race-based slave society.
When I arrived in HNOC’s lobby I told the woman at the front desk that I’d come to see the Portrait of Betsy. Placing her hand to her heart, she exhaled, “The story of that painting is such a tragedy.” She was alluding to the reason for my visit, the botched restoration work done on the painting in 1988 completed by local restorer Phyllis Hudson. Hudson’s job had been to tighten and reinforce the canvas, clean the portrait, repair any abrasions, and touch up any worn away or cracked off paint—to bring out the artist’s original style and content. However, this restorer set out to correct something more than the ravages of time. When all was said and done, she’d “corrected” the woman portrayed…
There has been a great deal of mystery surrounding the identity of the woman in the gold tignon. Created in 1837 by New Orleans-based Bavarian-born artist François Fleischbein, the painting had been rumored to be Marie Laveau (1801–1888), the so-called “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans. Then, in 1976, the Times Picayune published a preliminary drawing of the painting in an article by local art critic, George Jordan, who asserted that the woman of color portrayed was “probably the artist’s slave, Betsy.” However, this identification has proved baseless and unlikely for several reasons. Jordan’s speculations were ostensibly based on writing on the back of preliminary sketches of the portrait, however this writing has never come to light and the sketches have since disappeared. In addition, there is no proof that Fleischbein ever participated in the institution of slavery—not a single slave sale record exists in his name and no Black or interracial women are ever listed on the family’s census records. What’s more, François Fleischbein painted at least two other portraits for free women of color, one of which HNOC would acquire in 2015. Fleischbein also trained Julien Hudson, a prominent free artist of color who also painted portraits and later worked as a portrait photographer. Unfortunately, when the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) purchased the painting in 1985, Jordan’s conjecture informed their perception of the work, which they consequently (mis)titled Betsy and when announcing the portrait’s acquisition they referred to the woman portrayed as a “servant in the painter’s household.” The painting, However, tells a different story. From her opulent accessories to the exquisite original gold-leaf frame, it is obvious the painting does not portray an enslaved woman; she is also not Marie Laveau. While Marie Laveau may have been spiritually powerful and financially stable, she was not a member of the New Orleans elite, and this woman was. So, where does this notion come from?
To start with, New Orleans loves Marie Laveau. Everyone wants a piece of her, especially art collectors. There was a high demand from the general public for images of Laveau immediately following her death in June of 1881. It became so forceful that one of Laveau’s daughters had to make a public announcement stating that her mother had never sat for a portrait artist, photographer, or profile maker. Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth-century galleries and auction houses would sensationalize most portraits of women of color by alleging the sitters represented Marie Laveau. Consequently, just about every single Antebellum portrait of a woman of color has been “identified” as Marie Laveau at one point or another
When women of color were not “Marie Laveau” in portraits, they were hyper-sexual quadroons, (or mulattas) in genre paintings and popular fiction. If you’ve taken a tour in this city, you’ve likely heard of “quadroon balls.” “Quadroon” is a derogatory English term for a person with a quarter-African and three-quarters European ancestry. Travel writers often described quadroon women as attractive, with the sensual allure akin to that of a siren. Many of travelers wrote about mythical “Quadroon balls” where African mothers presented their “near-white” daughters to “eligible” wealthy white men, who they hoped might enter into a long-term sexual partnership (a relationship often referred to as plaçage) with their daughters. These white men would allegedly set up their “quadroon lovers” with an apartment of their own. The men would buy their lovers jewels and dresses in exchange for sexual favors, that is, until a suitable white woman came along whom he could marry. Then, the “quadroon” would either be cast aside, aged and ruined, or become their mistress. Any money she made was his. Any children they had were illegitimate. Their daughters often repeated their mother’s mistakes, aspiring to marry a white man, so that they might feel accepted.
In fact, quadroon balls as described above likely never took place to New Orleans and plaçage is a twentieth century derogatory term used to describe interracial partnerships or sex. These narratives were created to find an excuse for white men’s attraction to women (Black and interracial), who society defined as less than human, and to deflect from the reality of rape. Events similar to quadroon balls did take place, but only following the arrival of ten thousand Haitian refugees in 1809. Then, desperate women with no form of local support did what they could to survive, “partnering” with white men to provided domestic and sexual favors. While you can find a few ads for “quadroon balls” in English newspapers from the Antebellum period, is most likely they were attended by tourists and represented prostitution rings operating under the guise of a mythic interracial custom. Black women had little to no agency in these situations.
If we believe these tales, the only way a woman of color could obtain power would be to use magic or sell her body. The reality of life in New Orleans for free women of color was far more complex and indeed truly interesting. Free women of color entered into legitimate domestic partnerships with black, white, and interracial men alike. Though interracial marriage was illegal, white male partners could and on rare occasions did legitimize their relationship through paternity acknowledgements on baptismal records and by recognizing their interracial wives in their wills. Outside of marriage, women of color in Antebellum New Orleans possessed a degree of autonomy unheard of throughout the rest of the United States. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, people of color owned half of the property in the French Quarter and women of color owned 70% of that property—women of color possessed more land than white women and black men combined. They worked as housekeepers, au pairs, seamstresses, and tutors. They also purchased enslaved men, women, and children. Some formerly enslaved women purchased family members. Some freed women and would train enslaved women in a trade as apprentices, freed them, and set them up with businesses of their own. Other women did not. There are cases of plantations owned and run by free women and men of African descent. Free women of color were given an impressive amount of agency in colonial New Orleans outside of relationships with white men, which some used to resist racism, sexism, and the institution of slavery itself.
When looking at the portrait, it is not hard to imagine this sitter amongst these fascinating women. However, the reality of her status has been hard for some to stomach due to the perpetuation of tropes and stereotypes. To imagine an interracial family as the head of a plantation, which is the kind of wealth displayed by the woman who is most assuredly not-Betsy, would complicate our perceptions of the past.
Perhaps this is why, when confronted by the painting in the late-1980s, Phyllis Hudson took it upon herself to overpaint the entire canvas and in the process, erase the sitter’s lavish lace collar and yellow bow. Hudson also altered the background color of the portrait from a cool grey to an eerie greenish brown. She overpainted the ruffled design on her right sleeve and the details on her chair. She altered the contours of the sitter’s hand, face, and tignon. Finally, when releasing this work of a free woman of color back to the HNOC, Hudson seemingly settled the debate and noted the painting as “a portrait of Marie Laveau.”
HNOC was dismayed when they finally got the painting back from Hudson, who told them that the white paint of the collar appeared to be added at a later date and that no woman of color could have possessed such fineries. Surprised by HNOC’s reaction, she apparently offered to rework the painting, but the museum declined. While their refusal of Hudson’s offer would be understandable, it’s curious that the Collection did not have another conservationist look at the work immediately. In fact, another 30 years would pass before a staff member would advocate for the painting’s proper conservation.
Hudson’s restoration work ultimately represents a work of fiction, working in tandem with the reductive narratives surrounding Marie Laveau and the New Orleans quadroon. This is distressing, but hardly surprising. African American history is full of lies and omissions; so is women’s history, and Southern history, and American history, and world history. Institutions have permitted these lies to be perpetuated, and in doing so have skirted their responsibilities to our history and to our respective communities. Locals and transplants alike take such pride in the history of New Orleans, but do we really even know it? If we attach ourselves to these myths, history will be erased, and we may never know how exceptional New Orleans really is. In allowing for suspect narratives to become accepted as history, we allow for them to dominate our past, poison our present, and threaten our future. As a Black and interracial woman living in New Orleans, I feel a personal responsibility to the woman in this portrait. I want to find out her story. I need to know who she was, what she did, what she fought for. I need to know this woman, so I can know myself.
