George Louis Viavant (American/New Orleans, 1872-1925)

Native New Orleanian George Louis Viavant grew up hunting in the swamps and bayous surrounding his father's hunting lodge on Gentilly Road. Viavant's appreciation of the nature of southern Louisiana was reflected in his nature morte watercolor paintings of birds and animals. To insure the accuracy of his images, Viavant painted from fresh game that he had caught or that hunters and fishermen brought to his studio.

Source:
Jordan, George E. George L. Viavant: Artist of the Hunt. The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003.

GEORGE LOUIS VIAVANT (1872-1924)

With their accurate color and precise details, George Louis Viavant’s watercolors of bird, fish, and small wildlife become virtual scientific studies. Typically titled Nature Morte, a French term meaning still life, they partake of a long tradition dating to ancient Roman times. However, instead of being arranged on a tabletop, they hang vertically by strings, and are very “morte,” in other words, dead.

Viavant was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived there his entire life. He frequented his family’s hunting camp as a child which instilled in him a passion for the wildlife he hunted and fished. His studies in art began at an early age at the Southern Art Union (after 1886 the Artists’ Association of New Orleans) which had been established in 1880 by local artists Andres Molinary, Marshall J. Smith, and George David Coulon, among others, to foster an appreciation of the visual arts. It also managed the first circulating public library in New Orleans.

Under the auspices of the Art Union Viavant took lessons between 1884 and 1893 from Achille Perelli, an Italian immigrant who initially produced sculpture, but turned to wildlife art, clearly influencing his protégé. Viavant was precocious; when he was twelve he won a prize at a local exposition. At the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (1884/1885) he was awarded a blue-ribbon for a landscape.

Unlike such earlier artist-naturalists as Mark Catesby and John James Audubon, both Pecelli and Viavant did not position their subjects in active, although frozen, poses among appropriate vegetation. Nor did Viavant aspire to publication as his predecessors had done. Instead, Viavant painted fresh game directly from specimens that he or friends had captured, abundant near his residence in an eastern and rural section of New Orleans near bayous and Lake Pontchartrain. Most of his work consisted of compositions he titled Nature Morte, followed by an identification of the particular species, although occasionally he depicted landscapes with birds in flight or resting on ponds.

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org