Joseph Rusling Meeker (1827-1887)
Joseph Meeker received a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York City where he studied with famed Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand. During the Civil War, he traveled down the Mississippi River, as a Union Navy paymaster. In his free time, he sketched and studied the bayous and swamps of Louisiana. Meeker probably painted “Louisiana Bayou” while living in St. Louis, Missouri. There he did well as a painter of southern landscapes based largely on his drawings done in the military. Meeker’s paintings were also influenced by the nineteenth century’s waning romanticism and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline”.
Information courtesy of Neal Auction Company