Jean-Joseph Vaudechamp in France and Louisiana

This dissertation examines the transatlantic career of the nineteenth-century French portraitist Jean-Joseph Vaudechamp (1790-1864). A student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824), Vaudechamp worked as a portrait painter in Paris and began to journey to New Orleans, Louisiana, first arriving in 1832. There, Vaudechamp worked virtually every winter between 1832-39, where he was patronized both by the city's old Creole families and by the new American elite. Besides examining Vaudechamp's American itinerancy in issues of self-fashioning on behalf both of the artist and his sitters, this dissertation contains a catalogue of Vaudechamp's extant works and a chronology of his life and Salon exhibitions.