The Bursting Bungalow

Paul Fitch administers a booming online forum on Louisiana portraits while also collecting antiques, keeping multiple plants healthy, and cooking from scratch. A distant cousin calls him “a Bayou Teche Renaissance Man.”

“I was his mentor, but he’s surpassed me,” said New Orleans antiquarian Peter Patout. “I think he’s a genius in many departments. He knows the history of Louisiana. He started the Louisiana Portraits page on Facebook. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Louisiana portraits. He helped organize the St. Mary Parish portraits exhibit. He’s on the history committee for the Franklin bicentennial [in 2020], and formerly served on the boards of the Louisiana Preservation Alliance and the Jeanerette Bicentennial Museum.

“He’s very modest, but he has vast knowledge.”

In his own words, Fitch is a “master thrifter, borderline hoarder, collector extraordinaire!” He has an eye for a bargain and is always on the prowl for hidden treasures—which he finds on eBay and at antiques shops, thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales, yard sales, and occasionally on the side of the road. 

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He started the Louisiana Portraits group in September 2018; it now has nearly 700 members. “It was slow at first but it’s snowballing,” he said during a visit at his home in Franklin. “I’m pleased with the response. I’m very familiar with what’s out there, but there have been several new discoveries, people posting portraits I’ve never seen. It’s stimulated a lot of discussion about the artists and the sitters.

“I was always fascinated with portraits from early childhood,” he said. “I love having them around—they’re like company! And I love how they document the fashions and morés of their period. By studying them closely you can learn so much about social and material culture.”

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Fitch was on the steering committee for the 2003 exhibit of antebellum portraits of St. Mary Parish sitters. “We tracked down the portraits, and got a grant to mount the exhibit and publish the catalog,” he said.  “We even had two of them shipped from the Carolinas! That exhibit led to donations of portraits to St. Mary Landmarks. It led to the restoration of several portraits and the discovery of several new ones.”

Fitch himself has a small but significant collection of portraits, including one of John Wesley Richardson, painted in 1852, that he bought from descendants of the subject. “He built Westover plantation in Jeanerette,” said Fitch, who was born in that town, fourteen miles from Franklin. “This is not signed, but family papers in Chapel Hill say, ‘We paid Mr. [E.F.] Goddard to paint the entire family.’ There’s a portrait of his brother in the same type of frame.”

He bought an 1839 portrait of an unknown man by German-Louisiana painter Franz Jacob Fleischbein on eBay, where he also found his favorite portrait, of a little girl holding a cross. “It came from a Russian dealer living in Florida, who got it in Newcastle, England. It’s oil on paper, 1840.”

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Fitch houses his collections in a 1916 Craftsman bungalow in Franklin, which he bought in 2001. He didn’t move in until 2011, using the decade between to return it as closely as possible to its original look. He found a 1916 toilet at a salvage yard in New Orleans. “It took eight hours for the plumber to install the wall-mounted tank,” said Fitch, who also found wooden windows to replace the two aluminum updates. “A lady down the street sold me her claw-foot bathtub. 

He didn’t move in until 2011, using the decade between to return it as closely as possible to its original look

“The family who lived next door built [this] house for their son and his wife,” he said. “Their granddaughter was born here in 1916. She got in touch with me in 2006, when she was ninety. I invited her and her daughter to spend the night in the room where she was born. She was thrilled.”

Although the house changed hands several times, “Nobody who lived here had money, so they didn’t screw things up,” said Fitch, who believes in sticking as closely as possible to the original fabric of an old house. “If you want a new house, buy a new house. Don’t mess around with a period house.” 

He bought the house for $29,000 and put $40,000 into it. “The first two years, I put in a new roof, central air and heat, got the windows operable, and redid the electrical, plumbing, wiring, and sheetrock.”

He undid the kitchen and bathroom renovation from the late 1960s. “They glued Masonite onto the walls and were putting styrofoam ceiling tiles in the living and dining rooms when I bought it. I spent days on a ladder pulling out thousands of staples.” 

“They glued Masonite onto the walls and were putting styrofoam ceiling tiles in the living and dining rooms when I bought it. I spent days on a ladder pulling out thousands of staples.” 

After pulling up three layers of flooring, he painted the wooden floor of the bathroom in a black and white diamond pattern. “I spent hours and days on my hands and knees. It was a nightmare!”

He rescued the medicine chest from his maternal grandparents’ hotel in Jeanerette, which was torn down in the early 1980s. “I held on to this for thirty years,” he said, opening the cabinet door to reveal an image of the Blessed Virgin that he placed inside the door “because, as the old folks say, I’m grand Catholique.

“I teach myself to do a lot of things,” said Fitch. “I learned to operate a circular saw and recreated the wainscoting in the dining room, which I put in the bathroom. That was hugely successful. I had a picture frame that was too big, so I sawed it and cut it down. I fixed the waterline on the toilet. I taught myself to sew and made the curtains in my bedroom and bathroom.

“With a hot glue gun, I could change the world!” 

He removed the screens from the front porch and had the house painted in two shades of green with cream trim and red doors and windows. He dug up the footing for the original brick back steps, salvaging forty-eight whole bricks and several broken ones. “I plan to edge a flower bed with them.

“In an eleven-hundred-square-foot house, you’ve got to use every nook and cranny,” said Fitch of his two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Kneeling in front of a particular secret nook, he pulled out his silver chests. “Do you think a single man needs three sets of silver?” he quipped. “My grandmother had Marie Antoinette from Alvin, my grandfather had Virginiana by Gorham, and I bought Fiddlethread, early-nineteenth-century pieces by different makers—some French, some German, some English—that I found at auctions, from dealers, on eBay.

“I have four or five different sets of china all over the house. I have boxes of china under the bed, and more in the garage.”

He often posts photos of his finds on Facebook, accompanied by self-deprecating allusions to his love of the hunt. “Because I need more stuff,” he writes. Or “Because I just can’t help myself.” 

He found the comfortable chair in the living room on Facebook Marketplace for $35. “I met the seller in the Walmart parking lot in Broussard. It was like doing a drug deal.”

In his spare bedroom, which doubles as storage space, three recently acquired portraits rest on the floor. A 1961 portrait of Matilda Aloisio by New Orleans artist Charles Richards “was five dollars at the Council on Aging thrift store,” he marveled. “She was a local powerhouse on the political scene. A lady sent me a biography of her. Every portrait has a story.”

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Also in the guest bedroom is an 1840s Campeche chair important enough to be featured in the book Furnishing Louisiana, published by The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2010.

“The chair was in my grandparents’ hotel lobby for years,” he said. “It was painted white in the 1950s, and by the 1990s had gotten relegated to the garage. My mother wanted to put it on the street for trash pickup, but I had a sentimental attachment to it. I was well aware of Campeche chairs, but I never made the connection because I had seen it all my life, and it is much larger than the ones I had seen.  A friend went to the colonial museum in Havana, Cuba, and took photos of chairs identical to mine. When I saw the pictures, it hit me like a lightning bolt.”

Fitch had the mahogany frame refinished and the original leather seat replaced. “When we took off the 1950s brocade upholstery, we discovered that the chair was stuffed with burlap feed sacks stenciled, ‘General Merchandise/Havana Cuba.’  I love it, but I don’t sit in it because it just kills my back!”

Family photographs occupy much of the wall space. “”My great-grandfather Pasquale D’Anna came to Jeanerette from Cefalu, Sicily, in 1896 with one son. He worked in the cane fields for fifty cents a day. He got a wagon, sold groceries, and sent for his wife and two more children. Later he had a grocery store. His daughter and her husband, my grandparents, owned the Frances Hotel. They bought the house in 1930 at a tax sale for $2500. It was back of town, a rooming house. They did a booming business with traveling salesmen. When I was a child, it had forty-two rooms. Some were apartments. One woman lived there for more than thirty years. I grew up with this cast of characters. When I was five, I would say, ‘I’m going visiting.’ I’d sit and drink ice water with the old people.”

In a photo his Sicilian grandmother, Frances D’Anna LaGarde, wears a coat with chinchilla trim. “She was extremely fashionable,” said Fitch. “She would set her hair every night, and every day she put on powder and rouge and dressed in a suit, heels, and stockings. Just to stay home!”

A small pillow with the initials FDL rests on his bed. “This was my grandmother’s lingerie case. I had a pillow that just fit inside it.” 

A reconditioned Chambers stove in the kitchen “was in my grandparents’ house that was built in 1953. That’s the original color, fire engine red.”

The tour complete, Fitch ushered his guests to a table set with 1930s Morimura china, once owned by his great-aunt and -uncle, and Fiddlethread silver. He served iced gazpacho and chicken salad—and for dessert a beautiful flan and dark-roast coffee with chicory. 

Roses in a nearby vase perfumed the room, their scent wafted by the breeze from a 1939 oscillating fan he rescued from the trash. “My great-grandfather planted the rosebush in Jeanerette,” he said. “It’s either Cramoisi Supérieur or Louis Philippe. They’re disease-resistant and very fragrant. I moved it here a few years ago. My great-grandmother died in 1931. Every Sunday my great-grandfather would cut some of the roses and put them on her grave.”

Surrounded by his treasures, Fitch leaned back and admired the view. “Some people think my house is too cluttered, but I like it this way,” he said. “I have no interest in living a Pinterest-perfect life.”  

Join Fitch in exploring  our state’s history of portrait art in the Louisiana Portraits group on Facebook.

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.