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In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans. Edited by Erin Greenwald. (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2010. Pp. [xii], 114. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-917860-57-7.)
The two essays in this well-illustrated volume use the different methods of historian and art historian to reconstruct the life and works of Julien Hudson, the second-earliest known portraitist of African descent in the United States. In the first essay, historian Patricia Brady relies on sacramental records, notarial archives, court records, and census data to reveal many details about Hudson's short life (1811-1844) and the world in which he lived. The second essay, written by art historian and museum curator William Keyse Rudolph, examines Hudson's art within the context of its time and expounds on the...