Cajun Love Song
ANIMATION CELL STUDIES
Live Oaks and Spanish Moss | Bayou Lafourche, Donalsdonville, Louisiana ca.1836
[AI-created visual research] My great great grandparents in Donaldsonville, LA. ca. 1850
This gallery of images displays my visual research in developing animation cells based on AI images, and hand-painted watercolors. The story is a love story between a Jewish man from Germany who, in 1836 decides to travel to the United States where he meets a young Catholic woman in sugar cane country. She ultimately converts to Judaism to marry the man who goes on to be a successful businessman owning several plantations as a result of planters’ debts because of the Civil War. I have always struggled with the economic pressures of the time, with how he, as a Jewish man only speaking Yiddish, and signing his name phonetically in Hebrew, would have wrestled with the essential tenets of Judaism, regarding slavery and his own dealing with antisemitism.
1836, Jacob Lemann, finds passage to New Orleans possibly as a butcher aboard the SS. MClellan. He is depicted here having arrived at the Docks at Le Havre, France after traveling from Darmstadt in the State of Hesse what is now Germany. [AI in a watercolor style]
Horse and Buggy alongside Bayou Teche. [AI visual research]
Miriam (neè Marie) Estelle Berthelot, as a young woman.
Animation screentest of Jacob, digitally painted from an actual photo. ca.1875 [AI-enabled animation, based on my watercolor]
Marie Adriene Persac [watercolor on paper]
The painter Marie Adrien Persac is a highly educated French man and a fine artist, who cartographically mapped the Mississippi River and the adjacent large plantation homes as well as paint portraits of the houses in exchange for room and board. The Animation will be narrated by
Marie Adrien Persac often considered as “Louisiana’s painter.”
These paintings below also show my great great grandfather’s establishment of a mercantile business and later his son’s creation of a general merchandising store, B. Lemann and Bros in Donaldsonville, Louisiana on the Mississippi. The intention is to show the industrious contributions of the outsider to the newly formed United States through the tumult and devastation of a civil war and the values and ethics that his faith had instilled in him.
A watercolor from the AI source image [below] of Jacob making a deal in New Orleans
An AI image, created in the style of Edgar Degas’s painting
The Cotton Merchants depicting Jacob Lemann in his role of a “
handelmann” (
someone who survives by his connections and networks).
Jacob at 45 inspecting a wheelwright’s operation.
Jacob Lemann, middle aged, traveling transatlantic on the SS McLellan, bound for New Orleans from Le Havre, France. His networks were both in the U.S. and Abroad.
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Marie Adriene Persac
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As a child coming from the Alsace region and the Western State of Hesse from little towns called Darmstadt or Hechtsheim.
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SS. NEPTUNE on departure from Le Havre, France, bound for Louisiana.
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Jacob only wrote in Hebrew, he needed others to sign his documents.
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A young 27 year old Jacob Lemann, dockside getting his paperwork in order for his journey to the New World.
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Getting his paperwork and belongings together upon arrival in Louisiana.
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His profession was listed in his travel papers as a Butcher.
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A crowd gathers when Jacob arrives.
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Many German Jews were spread out throughout the South.
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As he aged, Jacob settled into the rural lifestyle of a Jewish Merchant.
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male crowd of German Jewish men prior to emigration.
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Jacob would continue back and forth across the Atlantic to Paris on business.
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Eventually Jacob would be a dealmaker using his connections.
In the Old country he would be called a Handleman– someone who survived by his networks.
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A watercolor showing M. Persac Painting.
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While Jacob was away overseas in Paris, his future wife, Marie Berthelot helped her father manage a plantation.
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Persac would go on to paint Palo Alto Plantation, prior to Jacob Lemann’s ownership from Pierre Ayraud.
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PALO ALTO PLANTATION by Persac
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B. Lemann and Bros, was my great grandfather’s general merchandise store in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, on the National Historic Registry.
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Horse and Buggy alongside Bayou Teche.
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Alongside the Mississippi River looking South. The “River Road.” had many large Plantation Houses.
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Early on, he was considered a peddler.
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A watercolor sketch of a peddler on the Bayou road.
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Many Jewish male immigrants in mid 19th Century were considered “peddlers”.
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Persac painting in the hot Louisiana sun.
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Persac would return to his room to formalize his painting, even to decoupage figures onto his paintings from magazines.
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Persac’s studio view: he would eventually paint PALO ALTO PLANTATION, a sugar plantation he would receive from the debts owed to him before the end of the Civil War..
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Persac would paint river home portraits in exchange for room and board.
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A live Oak on a small bayou
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Persac a French painter, cartographer and architect, painting the bayou. [AI]
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Persac painting Bayou Teche on a day off.
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Sharecroppers harvesting sugar after a crop burn.
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The housekeeper at PALO ALTO PLANTATION, Miss Maybelle.
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This is Palo Alto’s Sugar Mill with many of the field hands, formerly slaves.
