Were the two antebellum gentlemen a gay couple? More views of a mysterious $704,000 drawing – NOLA.com

This is the long, complicated follow-up story to an earlier complicated story about a beautifully preserved, circa 1845, pastel drawing of two gentlemen that was purchased last year by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a French Quarter museum, for $704,000. The artwork is a rendering of a 19th century odd couple.

One of the dudes appears to be old and White; the other appears to be young, and maybe Black. Based on their clothes and jewelry, they’re both wealthy. But their relationship is a mystery. They’ve long been considered a White father acknowledging his mixed-race son, which would have rare at the time, in an artwork or anywhere else. But some observers believe the men might have been a romantic pair.

The identity of the artist is also a mystery. For years, the renowned lithographer, photographer, and portraitist Jules Lion was thought to be a so-called “free man of color,” part of the community of African-Americans in antebellum New Orleans who were able to conduct business, own property and otherwise enjoy liberties not available to most Black people.

But, relatively recent research by an art historian named Sarah Picard has seemingly shown that Jules Lion was really a Jewish immigrant from France, which pulled the rug out from under decades of presumption.

If you’re the sort of reader that requires a high degree of clarity and certainty, it may be time to scroll on down to some other section right now. But for those readers who appreciate that sometimes questions are way more interesting than answers, then – as Kermit Ruffins might say – ALL ABOARD!

‘That’s a gay couple’

Drew Ward is certainly interested in the mysterious $704,000 pastel double portrait. But he’s not certain of anything else. Ward, who is a linguist, a former candidate for New Orleans City Council, and a self-styled historical researcher, said that to his eye, the double portrait may not depict a father and son, as broadly believed.

Instead, Ward said, “My first thought was, that’s a gay couple.”

True, the artwork may depict a May-December romance, but that’s not unheard of, then or now. Gay relationships were mostly kept on the down low during Jules Lion’s era, of course. So, the mystique of the artwork may have as much to do with forbidden love as the acknowledgement of racial blending.

“In the pastel, the body language feels too intimate and there seems to be a lot of intentional attention drawn to that giant ruby ring on the younger man’s hand,” Ward wrote via text.

Is it possible that the conspicuous ruby ring in the drawing is a symbol of bonding, like a wedding ring in an era when same-sex weddings were unthought of? Is it possible that a previous owner of the artwork considered destroying it in the early 20th century because it represented a violation of a sexual taboo (more about this later)? And is it possible that Jules Lion was the perfect artist to render a relatively intimate portrait of a gay couple, because he may have been gay too?

It has to be considered. After all, the whole LGBTQ population was seen but unseen at the time.

Doppelgangers, separated by decades?

But, what may be Ward’s most remarkable observation had nothing to do with either the sexual or racial identity of the sitters. As Ward studied the faces in the June 2 NOLA.com story about the double portrait, it struck him that the older gentleman, Moses, may not look especially like his presumably adopted son Achilles. But he looks an awful lot like Jules Lion’s brother Achille. At least he looked like Achille might have looked in later life. 

When Ward carefully compared Jules’ portrait of Achille and Moses, the similarities couldn’t be denied.

“Look at the eyes. Notice that they’re not symmetrical,” Ward wrote. “Nothing about them are, not the brows nor the shapes of the eyes themselves. These two both have matching flaws at the bend of that left eyebrow.”

Once you study the two faces together, you just can’t unsee the similarities. But, like everything else about this pastel, that only makes understanding it more difficult. Are Achille Lion and Nathan Moses doppelgangers, separated by decades? Or maybe the date of the artwork is incorrect and the gentleman on the right is Jules’ brother as an older man? If so, how does the younger, seemingly darker man fit in?

Truth is, nothing about this portrait fits in.

Meet Regenia Alfreda Perry

Dr. Regenia Perry is the person who first put Jules Lion’s double portrait on the radar, so to speak. Perry, who was born in North Carolina, is 81 now. She said she’s not 100 percent sure what a Wikipedia page is, but she’s been told she has one.

Deservedly so. Perry was, as her Wiki entry announces, “one of the first African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in art history.”

That was back in 1966. Nine years later, she became the first African-American guest curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, when she was asked to select the paintings, sculptures and crafts for an exhibit titled “Selections of Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Art.”

19th-century nervous breakdown

Perry doesn’t pull any punches when she describes the sometimes-painful challenge of being a 35-year-old Black woman stepping into a mostly White men’s domain. “The Met did everything in their power to give me a nervous breakdown,” she said, laughing grimly. For instance, she said, the Met management was convinced that the cover of the exhibit catalog should be decorated with a beautiful but – in her view — benign quilt.

Instead, Perry insisted that Lion’s double portrait — which was considerably more sociologically charged – was put on the cover. She said it was non-negotiable. They could have their quilt or their curator, but not both.

The pastel drawing by Lion had a special place in Perry’s heart. A few years earlier, she’d begun making regular pilgrimages to Melrose plantation in Natchitoches, which she considered an “intoxicating” touchstone of African-American history. There, she befriended an art lover named Francois Mignon, who lived in one of the buildings on the property and owned the striking Lion double portrait, which hung over his fireplace.

Cracking the case

Mignon told Perry he’d purchased the artwork with Lyle Saxon, a popular journalist and chronicler of early 20th-century New Orleans culture. When Saxon died in 1945, it became Mignon’s alone. For some reason, Perry said, Mignon was “always uncomfortable” about discussing the pastel or its previous owner. He did, however, provide a couple of clues that he’d learned from Saxon.

Perry said that Mignon told her that the older man in the drawing was a merchant who had adopted his Black, illegitimate son. Mignon confided that the owner of the artwork had considered destroying the century-old drawing, presumably because of “the sensational nature of the subject matter.”

Armed with that information, Perry said she scoured documents in – of all places – the library of The Historic New Orleans Collection, the very place the artwork would find a home a half-century later. There, she discovered the story of Asher Moses Nathan, the antebellum dry goods merchant who’d made history when he legally adopted his mixed-race son by a special act of the Louisiana Legislature. Nathan and his son Achile were surely the pair depicted in the drawing, Perry concluded.

“Francois (Mignon) gave me enough to go on,” she said. “I cracked that case based on what Lyle Saxon told him.”

Perry’s identification of the sitters has accompanied the artwork ever since.

Like practically everyone else in the early 1970s, Perry believed that the artist Jules Lion was either Black or of mixed race, because he was identified as a “free man of color” in 19th-century city directories. Sarah Picard’s 21st-century research that indicates he was a French Jewish immigrant who was misidentified as a free Black man, possibly because he was married to a Black woman, hasn’t changed Perry’s mind whatsoever.

“From an African-American perspective,” Perry said, “no 100 percent, solid white man would allow his race to be listed as a free man of color, no matter what his wife or mistress or companion was.”

And anyway, in Perry’s opinion, “the picture is more important than the race of the artist.”

Great-, great-, great-grandpa Jules

The recent, rather public discussion of Jules Lion’s racial and religious identity has shaken Rhonda Michel Graffeo’s family tree to the roots. Graffeo, 63, is Jules Lion’s great-, great-, great-granddaughter. Growing up, she said, her mom told her that they had ancestors by the name of Lion, but she didn’t know much more.

Ethnically speaking, Graffeo said she was taught that, like lots of people in the New Orleans area, her pedigree was some combination of French, Spanish, Italian, and Irish, and the family was Catholic.

The extended family’s renewed interest in grandfather Jules began when art historian Picard contacted one of Graffeo’s cousins to discuss her conclusion that the renowned artist/photographer had descended from a Parisian Jewish family. The NOLA.com | Times-Picayune story about one of grandfather Jules’ drawings selling for almost three-quarters of a million bucks further grabbed the attention of Graffeo’s kin.

“When that story came out, I said, ‘That’s him, that’s him!’ Graffeo said.

Heinz 57

Several family members attended a June reception at The Historic New Orleans Collection, where they got a closeup look at their distant relative’s handiwork and were touched by some of his glory and mystery. Of course, Graffeo said, everyone’s excited to have a famous artist in the family.

Graffeo is a former dental office worker who now devotes her time to grandmothering. Over the past few years, she’s become interested in her family genealogy, so she naturally took one of those mail-order DNA tests.

The test determined that “we’re such a Heinz 57,” she said, a reference to the multi-flavored condiment. The test determined that she’s more than 40 percent French, but she also had ancestors scattered all over Europe. The test showed that there are some Jewish forebears in the mix. But, she said, there were no African ancestors.

Based on her research, Graffeo’s believes her family branch sprouted from the marriage of Jules Lion to Marie Emma Munoz, her great-, great-, great-grandmother, in 1856. She has a couple of pictures of their son Emilien Jules Lion, who is her great-, great-grandfather.

Courageous Lion

According to Graffeo’s research, Jules had been married previously to a woman named Marie Charlotte Armantine Broyard, who was described as a “mulatto” in the segregationist lingo of a 19th-century New Orleans census. Graffeo imagines that Jules’ marriage to a mixed-race woman somehow led to him being bureaucratically considered a free man of color.

But who knows? And what does it matter, really? Whoever Jules Lion was, she said, he had the courage to toy with the taboos of his time, when he drew the mysterious artwork.

“You still had slavery,” she said. “And I think (creating the portrait) may have been frowned upon. I know a lot of artists like to push the envelope, and cause controversy, and cause discussion. I’m proud of him. Good for you, grandpa.”

Le Musée de F.P.C.

What makes Jules Lion an especially mystifying historical character is that we don’t know what he looked like. Or maybe we do.

Le Musée de f.p.c., a history museum dedicated to free people of color at 2336 Esplanade Ave., has been illustrating the complicated racial relationships in antebellum New Orleans since long before Lion’s double portrait became a cause célèbre. The museum’s collection includes a precise watercolor painting, smaller than a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper, that may be a self-portrait of Jules Lion.

The dapper, bright-eyed young man in the painting wears a pencil moustache, parted raven hair and a knotted cravat. Tellingly, he cradles what seems to be a daguerreotype photo in his hands. Who but Lion – the man credited with introducing photography to New Orleans – would be depicted holding a daguerreotype?

The tiny painting seems to be signed with Jules Lion’s initials. But, of course, that doesn’t prove it’s a self-portrait. It could be a painting of any good-looking young dude who wanted his portrait to demonstrate that he was onto the avant-garde technology of the time, photography.

Truth is, there’s not a lot of proof of anything, anywhere in this story.

New Lions?

Historic New Orleans Collection chief curator Jason Wiese said that after The Times-Picayune’s story about the Lion double portrait ran, a New Orleans area resident sent the museum pictures of two more Lion pastel portraits that have long been family heirlooms.

Wiese said these two rare drawings — depicting a White family group and a White young woman — had been unknown to scholars. But, he said, they seem “strikingly similar to ours, in technique and, particularly, in the style of the signature. It remains to be seen what the “new” Lions may tell us about the magnetic Mr. Lion.

“We’re still working on it,” Wiese said of the myriad mysteries.

The Lion double portrait is on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection’s 533 Royal St. location. Admission is free, with hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30, Tues-Sat, and 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 on Sundays.

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