George Rodrigue valuation
Painted Cajun Louisiana under dark oaks, and then a blue dog that would not leave.
George Rodrigue was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1944 and spent his early career painting Cajun life — figures under heavy, low, black oak trees, lit as though by a flash.
What a work by George Rodrigue is worth
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Bio
George Rodrigue was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1944 and spent his early career painting Cajun life — figures under heavy, low, black oak trees, lit as though by a flash. In 1984 a commission to illustrate a ghost story required the loup-garou, the Cajun werewolf, and he painted it from a photograph of his own dead spaniel Tiffany. The result would not go away: the Blue Dog, with yellow eyes, became a national image through Absolut and Xerox advertising and hundreds of paintings, and he spent the rest of his life both exploiting and being defined by it. He died in 2013.
The Blue Dog dominates the market, and the early Cajun landscapes are a smaller, distinct and critically better-regarded field. The practical problem is edition volume: silkscreens, giclees and licensed reproductions were published in very large numbers over three decades, and owners frequently believe they hold something scarcer than they do. Original acrylics on canvas sit well above them. Certificates from the Rodrigue studio and the foundation are expected, and unauthorised reproductions of the Blue Dog images circulate widely.
The Aioli Dinner, Bayou and Blue Dog Relief
Rodrigue studied art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His early paintings include The Aioli Dinner, shared between the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and The Class of Marie Courrege, which won an honourable mention at the Paris Salon in 1975 and led Le Figaro to call him America's Rousseau. The first Blue Dog painting, Watch Dog, was made for Bayou, a book of Louisiana ghost stories.
After Hurricane Katrina he painted We Will Rise Again for the Red Cross and began Blue Dog Relief, which also raised money for the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis gave him a 40-year retrospective in 2007, which travelled to New Orleans in 2008. His galleries were in Carmel, Lafayette and New Orleans.
Pasadena, Evangeline and the Saga of the Acadians
After Lafayette he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, returning to Louisiana in the late 1960s. Among his best-known pictures are those of Evangeline, the Acadian heroine of Longfellow's poem of 1847, and of Jolie Blonde, a modern Cajun Evangeline. Between 1985 and 1989 he painted the Saga of the Acadians, fifteen pictures following the Acadians from France to Nova Scotia to Louisiana and ending with the official return visit to Grand Pré, and he designed three posters for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, with portraits of Louis Armstrong, Pete Fountain and Al Hirt.
Absolut made him one of its artists in 1992. After the hurricane he followed We Will Rise Again with Throw Me Something FEMA and You Can't Drown the Blues for the New Orleans Museum of Art, sent prints of To Stay Alive We Need Levee 5 to every member of Congress, and gave Cut Through the Red Tape to the United Way. In 2009 he set up the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts, which promotes art in children's education with a scholarship contest and art supplies for schools, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette gave him an honorary doctorate the same year.
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