Louisiana State Museum [T0347.1991]

St. Louis Cathedral was the focal point of life for the city's French-speaking Afro-Creole community. Under the colonial Code Noir, church missionaries had incorporated the city's population of black, both enslaved and free, into the life of the church. Afro-Creole New Orleanians perceived the Spanish clergy as a useful ally and developed close ties to Father Antonio de Sedella, the head of the cathedral until his death in 1829, who preached to a racially mixed congregation and extended the Catholic rites of baptism, communion, and marriage to interracial couples and their illegitimate offspring. Later, the church passed under the control of conservative Anglo-American authorities. Both free and enslaved African Americans faced segregation, exclusion, and other restrictions on their participation in church services. This painting of St. Louis Cathedral on Chartres Street was done by Jules Lion, a free man born in France in 1816. He was a painter of portraits and miniatures, as well as a lithographer and a daguerreotypist. He died in New Orleans in 1866.