Philippe Garbeille

French, c. 1818–1853

Garbeille is first identified as an artist in Marseilles in 1838, working at Bouches-du-Rhône. He studied in Rome with renowned Danish-Icelandic sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770–1840) before coming to New Orleans in 1842. Garbeille proposed a gallery of art and the formation of an artists' society to little effect. He concentrated on religious sculpture and portrait busts executed in a forceful, neoclassical style, and also made caricatures and cut silhouettes.

Among his most important commissions are St. Francis and the Virgin and Child (1846) for St. Louis Cathedral, and portraits of Zachary Taylor (1847), President James Knox Polk (1848), and Andrew Jackson (1848). Garbeille was in New York from 1849 until 1850, and in Havana, Cuba, in 1853. He returned to New Orleans a few months before his death.

Edward Livingston
Philippe Garbeille, c. 1840
Plaster, 24 ½ x 15 x 11 ½ inches
Louisiana State Museum M220

Having lost all of his money through the dishonesty of another, Livingston (1764–1836) moved from New York to Louisiana in 1804. He organized troops of mixed race for the Battle of New Orleans and supported Jean Lafitte. He wrote substantial parts of the Louisiana Civil Code, adopted in 1825, and worked on the famous "Livingston Code" of criminal law from 1821 until 1833. Publication was delayed because the manuscript was destroyed by fire, twice, in 1824 and 1826.

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