Ogden Museum of Southern Art

A gift of art from Roger Ogden and his father to his mother nearly 40 years ago marked the beginning of a collection that today forms the heart of the new Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans. Louisiana businessman and philanthropist Roger Ogden first saw Blue Lagoon, a Southern landscape by the early 20th century artist Alexander Drysdale, at a Baton Rouge, Louisiana art gallery in 1966. Captivated by its beauty, Ogden, a college student at the time, persuaded his father to help him buy the painting for his mother as a Christmas gift. For a number of years to follow, father and son continued the habit, fostering the younger Ogden's interest in Southern art.

The collection Roger Ogden went on to assemble was one of the first to focus solely on Southern art, helping to identify and define the genre. Ogden's collection helped to revive the forgotten works of great Southern artists and preserved an important aspect of Southern culture.

By the mid-1980s, Ogden had collected a full range of paintings that recounted the history and changing aesthetics of painting in Louisiana. The collection included 19th-century portraits by Jacques Amans, landscapes by William Henry Buck, Richard Clague and Clarence Millet, and works such as Mother Louisiana, an allegorical portrait of the state of Louisiana by Dominico Canova. Gradually, he began to expand his collection by including artists from other Southern states, and broadening the scope of works to include sculpture, photography, works on paper, self-taught art, and mixed media. By the 1990s, the Ogden Collection was recognized by art historians and collectors as one of the most significant of its kind in the nation.