The Works of Anne Marguérite Joséphine Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville

Anne Marguérite Joséphine Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville (1771–1849), arrived in America in 1807 as a refugee from Napoleonic France and embarked on an extraordinary journey of discovery. Her unparalleled watercolors and drawings—made while traveling in seven countries and on the high seas—provide an invaluable historical record of the early American republic and its racially diverse population. Neuville emerges as a cosmopolitan, self-taught artist who exerted influence in political and social circles on both sides of the Atlantic. As a woman and an outsider, the artist was a keen and sympathetic observer of individuals across socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. She drew the earliest ethnographically correct images of Indigenous Americans, together with long-vanished urban views. Although she arrived as an outcast, she quickly acclimated to her new life and over the course of seven years recorded images of important people and historic buildings no longer extant. By the end of her second residency (1816–22), as the celebrated wife of the French Minister Plenipotentiary Jean Guillaume Hyde de Neuville (1776–1857), she was interacting with political leaders and making her mark on society in Washington, DC, as well as in New York City, where with her founding husband, she was involved with the enlightened Economical School (École Économique), whose mission was to educate French émigrés and fugitives from the French West Indies, and to offer affordable education to impoverished children of both sexes. Neuville’s astute corpus of over 200 sheets (165 held by the N-YHS) is on the largest known for a woman artist working in America. It documents her compelling life and early-nineteenth-century America with vivid and insightful imagery.

RJMO