Watercolors

Joseph Michel Paret was born at Pelussin, France, in 1807 and arrived at the German Coast parish in 1848. In 1858 he went down to New Orleans by steamboat, bought a sketchbook near St. Louis Cathedral and began to paint. He drew plantation layouts, fences, gardens, cemeteries and the river, canoes and Native travelers included. In letters home he described one of Louisiana's worst yellow fever epidemics. His sketchbook is silent on the war. The paintings turned up more than a century later in a trunk in Pelussin, and Marcel Boyer published his journal in 1993.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Destrehan Plantation — 0.8 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 17 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• Whitney Plantation — 18 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 18 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Ormond Plantation — steps away
• Hale Boggs Bridge — 0.4 mi
• George Prince Ferry Memorial — 0.4 mi
• "Denver" — 0.7 mi