François Fleischbein

François Jacques Fleischbein (1804–1868) was a German painter who lived and worked in New Orleans.

Fleischbein was born in Godramstein, Palatinate, nowadays Germany, in 1804. He studied painting in Paris with Anne-Louis Girodet. In 1833, he and his wife, Marie Louis Tetu, immigrated to cosmopolitan New Orleans, thus joining the community of international painters seeking fame in Louisiana.^[1] Although born Franz Joseph, Fleischbein decided to change his name to François in order to fit with his Creole clients of Gallic descent.

His paintings show a French academic style as well as a sweetness and charm common to 19th-century German painting.

With the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, Fleischbein also worked as an early photographer, an enterprise in which his wife took part.^[1]

• Old Sketchbook recalls early New Orleans artist, Times-Picayuna, George E. Jordan, 1976
• Old Louisiana Plantation Homes and Family Trees, Herman de Bachelle Seebold, vol. 1, p 23

• Media related to François Fleischbein at Wikimedia Commons
• Identity theft: A rare painting damaged, a story half-told, and a reckoning about bias in art stewardship - Article about a Fleischbein painting