George Rodrigue

Before the Blue Dog, Rodrigue was a painter of oaks. After art school at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and in Pasadena he came home in the late 1960s to paint Louisiana landscapes, then family gatherings and genre scenes under moss-draped trees. In 1975 his painting The Class of Marie Courrege won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon. The dog arrived with a 1984 book of ghost stories, inspired by his late dog Tiffany and the loup-garou legend. He founded an arts education foundation in 2009 and died in 2013.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• James Lee Burke — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away
• New Iberia Shipwreck — steps away
• Bayou Teche — steps away