Plantations by the River: Watercolor Paintings from St. Charles Parish, Louisiana by Father Joseph M. Paret, 1859/Aquarelles De St. Charles, Louisiane, Par Joseph M. Paret, ver

The present work comprises a second important installment in the documentation of the life of Father Paret. It is devoted to twenty-eight paintings made by Paret about the year 1859 in St. Charles Parish. The paintings were brought back to France when Paret returned home in 1869. They became the legacy of his brother Auguste and later, his descendants. Still bound together in their original sketchbook, they are presently owned by the Choretier family in the Forez-Viennois region of the Department of Loire.
This book is supplemented with an extensive introduction by three LSU scholars. The aged paintings have been carefully color-corrected to reveal all of their original vivacity. Better than any other single source, they reveal the nature of daily life in a wealthy and culturally conservative rural French parish of southern Louisiana, only two years before the onset of the Civil war.

Marcel Boyer has published several historical studies as well as Father Joseph M. Paret's Mon Journal d'Amerique. He lives in Givors, France. Jay D. Edwards, Kniffen Professor of Anthropology at Louisiana State University, is the author of Louisiana's Remarkable French Vernacular Architecture.