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Accession #	50.118
Artist	Joseph Rusling Meeker
Title	The Acadians in the Achafalaya, "Evangeline"
Date	1871
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	31 5/8 x 42 1/16 in. (80.3 x 106.8 cm) frame: 40 x 50 x 3 3/4 in. (101.6 x 127 x 9.5 cm)
Inscriptions	Inscribed verso under lining canvas: "The Acadians in the Achafalaya,/ "Evangeline"/ RM [in monogram] 1871."
Signed	Signed lower right: "JR Meeker, 1871"
Credit Line	A. Augustus Healy Fund
Location	American Identities: Colony to Nation / Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: In the years immediately before the Civil War, Northerners associated dense, steamy swamps with the moral decay of Southern society and the plight of runaway slaves. Here, Joseph Rusling Meeker conveyed the more Eden-like, post–Civil War vision of the swamps. He took his inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s earlier epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847). Longfellow tells of young Evangeline, one of the French Acadians expelled from Canada by the British in 1755, who searches for her lost lover amid a “dreamlike” and “strange” landscape. Adhering to Longfellow’s descriptions, Meeker evoked the lush flora of Louisiana’s Bayou Plaquemine, where Acadians sought refuge.