George Rodrigue: The Blue Dog Man

The Blue Dog Man

George Rodrigue wasn't from New Orleans — he was from New Iberia, deep in Cajun country. But his art became so synonymous with Louisiana that you can't walk through the French Quarter without seeing his influence. And for a generation of Americans, his Blue Dog was the image that came to mind when they thought of Louisiana art.

Born in 1944, Rodrigue grew up painting the moss-draped oak trees and Cajun landscapes of Acadiana. His early work was steeped in the culture he knew — paintings of dark, moody swamps and the Evangeline legend that defined Cajun identity. They were beautiful and melancholy, the kind of art that made you feel the humidity and hear the cicadas.

Then came the Blue Dog. In the mid-nineties, Rodrigue started painting a ghostly blue canine with piercing yellow eyes, inspired by the Cajun legend of the loup-garou — the werewolf — and based on his deceased dog Tiffany. The paintings were strange, arresting, and immediately iconic. When Absolut Vodka featured the Blue Dog in a 1992 ad campaign, Rodrigue went from regional artist to international phenomenon.

The Blue Dog divided the art world the way anything popular does — some loved it, some dismissed it, and meanwhile Rodrigue was selling paintings for six figures and becoming the most commercially successful Louisiana artist of his generation. He opened galleries in New Orleans and across the country, and the Blue Dog became as much a symbol of Louisiana as the fleur-de-lis.

After Hurricane Katrina, Rodrigue painted "We Will Rise Again" and other works that raised seven hundred thousand dollars for relief organizations. He established the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts to promote visual arts education in Louisiana schools.

He died in 2013 at sixty-nine. Rodrigue was a Cajun boy from New Iberia who painted a blue dog and turned it into one of the most recognizable images in American art. Only in Louisiana would a werewolf legend become a pop-art empire.