Does this 184-year-old scene in the 700 block of Chartres Street seem familiar? A closer look at the buildings in this 1842 lithograph by Jules Lion are recognizable but strangely different.
The Cabildo to the left, without its 1847 French-styled mansard roof, and St. Louis Cathedral, with its bell-shaped spires, look much as they did during the city’s Spanish colonial period that ended in 1803. Both buildings, plus the Presbytère on the opposite side of the cathedral, underwent major reconstruction and design changes in the early 1850s to give them the look we see today. The changes didn’t stop there. The small buildings to the right were demolished in 1849 to make way for the Pontalba Buildings that overlook Jackson Square.
As visually and historically interesting as this image is, the story about its maker is even more so. Jules Lion was a prominent New Orleans lithographer and the first known photographer to work in the city. His biography is a complex story of race, religion and art in Antebellum New Orleans.
Born in France around 1806, Lion sailed to New Orleans in 1837 where he took a job making lithographed portraits for a local newspaper.
Here is where his story gets confusing. According to Rhode Island College art historian Sara Picard, an 1850s New Orleans city directory listed Lion as a “free man of color” with the letters “f.m.c.” behind his name.
Not so, says Picard. After digging through French and American records, she states in a 2017 article for the academic journal “Louisiana History” that Lion was of French and German Jewish ancestry, not African. His birth name, she claims, was Jacob Isaac. Other Antebellum city directories and publications, she continues, simply called him Jules Lion or the French artist never mentioning race.
Skeptics, including other historians, have asked — If not a free man of color, why would Lion permit a city directory to identify him as such in a time when race was a rigid social and legal distinction? The answer is lost to history.
With that pretty well muddied up, Lion returned to France in early 1939 where he learned the new daguerreotype photography process created by Louis Jacques Daguerre. Later that same year, Lion was back in New Orleans making daguerreotypes of the city’s major buildings and landmarks, including one probably used to create this 1842 lithograph of St. Louis Cathedral. By March 1840, he had enough images to mount the city’s first daguerreotype exhibition.
Although Lion continued to make daguerreotypes in the early 1840s, he mostly produced and sold lithograph portraits of prominent Louisiana and national figures such as Andrew Jackson and John James Audubon. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, local publishers hired him to create covers for Confederate sheet music. But that short-lived venture ended after the city fell to Union Forces in May 1862. He then returned to teaching and selling lithograph portraits. Lion died in January 1866.
