Johnnie Canova
Illustrator
Plaquemine, La.

Nottoway Plantation Photograph courtesy of Iberville Parish Library

As far as plantations are concerned, plantation homes, it was back in 1981 when someone had challenged me to draw a picture of Nottoway and that's when I first started getting fascinated with the homes. I started looking up in books to find pictures of Nottoway and also a bunch of other plantation homes.

Belle Grove Rendering by Johnnie Canova

While I was doing that I came across the Belle Grove Plantation Home. I was really fascinated with it. It had a really pretty architecture to it. It was Greek Revival Architecture. But all of the photographs I've found of it showed it in a delapidated state, showed it where it was disrepaired- railings were missing, windows were mostly out. There are a lot of missing pieces. And I always kind of wondered what it might look like if it was fully restored. So that's one reason why I wanted to draw the Belle Grove. That's back in '81, when I originally decided I wanted to do something about it. Now here it is in '96 and I've finally gotten it drawn. Actually, I drew it in 95. It took me ten months to put the Belle Grove drawing together. Doing research on trying to find colors. Basically it was about 400 hours of work.