Marie Adrien Persac (December 14, 1823 - July 21, 1873) was a French painter, cartographer, photographer, and educator active in Louisiana in the middle part of the 19th century. Persac was born in Saumur, France - supposedly to a well-to-do family. He lived for a type in Lyon, France, before relocating to the United States in 1842, 'with 100,000 francs and a yen to hunt buffalo'. In 1851 he married Marie Odile Daigre (1823 - 1873), the daughter of a Baton Rouge farmer. He 1856, he partnered with William G. Vail, to open a daguerreotype photography studio on Florida Street in Baton Rouge - then an innovative new field. Poor financial management led this business to collapse after a short time in operation. He then took work as an artist and lithographer with 'Pessou and Simon' of Baton Rouge. (Of note, Louis Lucien Pessou, the senior partner, was a free man of color, born in New Orleans in 1824. He was the first African-American from New Orleans to play a major role in the city's printmaking.) At the same time he supplemented his income by painting plantations and surveying the property lines for the local auction and realty market. It was no doubt this work that let him to Benjamin Moore Norman, with whom he partnered to issue an important map illustrating the plantation properties along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez. As an artist he became well known for painting Louisiana plantation houses and antebellum life on the Mississippi. From 1859 to 1869, he completed 21 drawings of estates in collaboration with civil engineer Eugene Surgi (1826 - 1914). During the American Civil War (1861 - 1865) he remained in Louisiana, but did not participate in the War. Ain 1865, at the close of the war, he set up a photography studio in New Orleans. By 1867, his listed his profession in the New Orleans city directory was 'architect' and in 1873 'engineer'. He died on July 21, 1873 in Manchac, Louisiana at the Daigre family house and he is buried at Saint Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Baton Rouge.



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