Evangeline with a Basket of Roses
ca. 1975 by George Rodrigue
24 x 20 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed by the artist
Availability subject to change without notice.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem: Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, followed an Acadian girl named Evangeline Bellefontaine as she searched for her lost love, Gabriel Lajeunesse. The story tells of their separation on their wedding day during the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. A story of faith and devotion, the poem had a lasting cultural impact on the people of Louisiana.
Like Jolie Blonde, Evangeline was a recurring theme of George Rodrigue’s work. She represented his commitment to the preservation of his Cajun heritage, and this painting is one of over one hundred canvases he painted during the course of his forty-year career. In almost every painting, she has fair skin, dark hair, and a traditional white dress, most often set in a typical Rodrigue Cajun landscape with the massive oak tree, cut off at the top, and the light glowing from an unidentified source.
Held in a private collection since 1975, the painting is now available at Rodrigue Studios. It has been recently cleaned and varnished, revealing the ‘painterly’, wide brushstrokes made by the artist. As he painted her skirt, the swirls of his brush outline the shape of her legs beneath, creating shadows, with small sections of the canvas revealing the under-paint, and absence of the darker shades on top.