The Cotton Office in New Orleans

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The cotton office in New Orleans
Edgar Degas , 1873
73 × 92 cm
oil on canvas
Musée des beaux-arts de Pau , Pau

The Cotton Office in New Orleans ( French Le bureau de coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans ) is a painting by the French painter Edgar Degas . The picture, painted in oil on canvas, has a height of 73 cm and a width of 92 cm. Degas created the picture in 1873 while staying with relatives in New Orleans . It shows a group picture with traders and customers in his uncle's cotton trading company. The detailed interior picture is painted in the style of realism and is one of Degas' most famous pictures. The Musée des beaux-arts de Pau acquired the painting in 1878, a few years after it was painted. It was the painter's first work to be entered into a public collection.

Image description

The painting The Cotton Office in New Orleans is a "multi-figure and complexly arranged composition". Degas shows in this picture the office of the cotton trading company Musson, Livaudais, Prestidge and Co. in New Orleans. In an extremely wide-angle perspective, the view goes into a room with a receding floor, the vanishing point being in the narrow glass door on the opposite wall. In the room, several male people are grouped around a table with spread cotton. A partition with a large white window front protruding from the left edge of the picture leads to a neighboring office in which two other people are sitting. The room in the foreground is furnished with a few pieces of furniture. In addition to the central table and various chairs and stools, there is a standing desk on the right edge of the picture, next to the glass door on the back wall a narrow shelf reaching to the ceiling and filled with parcels, and on the right edge of the picture a marine picture hanging over the fireplace .

The art historian John Rewald managed to identify nearly half of the 14 people gathered in the room. In the center of the picture, Degas' brother René is sitting in a chair to the side in front of the table. He holds the open newspaper The Daily Picayune in his hands and is busy reading it. The brother Achille de Gas is leaning on the left edge of the picture with crossed legs against the window wall of the neighboring office. His elbows are propped back on a window frame, while his hands hang in the air in front of him. His gaze is directed towards what is happening in the middle of the room. Both brothers are neither employees nor customers of the office and are not part of the hustle and bustle. Your idleness or relaxed reading of the newspaper underscores your role as an uninvolved visitor.

Degas' uncle Michel Musson sits in the foreground. His legs are cut off from the lower edge of the picture in the area of ​​the knees. With his head tilted slightly to the right, he looks through his glasses examining a cotton swatch between his fingers. Between him and the left edge of the picture there is a brown wooden chair with curved arm and back rests on which more cotton lies as a sample. On the right side of the picture stands the partner responsible for the balance sheets at a desk, John E. Livaudais. As is typical of an accountant, he has taken off his jacket so that the white shirt sleeves stand out clearly from the dark vest. Similarly, an unknown person can be seen directly behind him and another person in the background in the center as an accountant. Livaudais has put his arms on the desk and is looking at the written notes in front of him. To his right are more papers, an inkwell, and a thick book. A woven basket filled with discarded papers also testifies to his work. On the side of the high desk is the signature "Degas Nle Orléans 1873" on the wood. The company's third partner, the Englishman James S. Prestidge, is sitting on a high stool in the corner of the large table to the right of the picture. He wears a beige jacket and has a full beard. Next to him is an unknown man who also has a full beard. Both look into a notebook in which the unknown man seems to be writing something. In the center of the picture, Musson's son-in-law William Bell has sat down on the edge of the table. With his torso turned to the right, he holds a tuft of cotton in his hands and presents it to an unknown customer who is standing opposite him behind the table with his hands propped up. In addition, there are two people standing at the end of the table near the bookkeeper in the center of the picture, who look at what is happening in a waiting or observing pose, and the two people mentioned above who are sitting in the neighboring room.

In this “ambitious group portrait”, Edgar Degas shows his brothers as well as a number of more or less employed people who can be identified as buyers or traders of cotton. In the preparatory sketch of the cotton merchant in New Orleans ( Fogg Art Museum , Cambridge (Massachusetts)), Degas initially selected a small section of the picture with three people in which the table with the spread out cotton takes up considerably more space in close-up. This sketch shows the impressionistic painting style typical of Degas' later work with a loose painting style. In the final version of the painting, he instead shows a fine painting that is based on the contemporary art of realism . With its repeated accents in white and black in the representation of the people and other details, the painting is reminiscent of Dutch models of the Baroque . For example, men dressed in black at a table can be found in the paintings Group Portrait of the Regents of the St. Elisabeth Hospital in Haarlem ( Frans Hals Museum , Haarlem) by Frans Hals or The Heads of the Cloth Makers' Guild ( Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ) by Rembrandt van Rijn .

  • Edgar Degas: Cotton Merchant in New Orleans , 1873

  • Frans Hals:
    Group picture of the regents of the St. Elisabeth Hospital in Haarlem , 1641

  • Rembrandt van Rijn:
    The Heads of the Cloth Makers' Guild , 1662

Degas visits his family in New Orleans

Edgar Degas had family roots in New Orleans. His mother, Célestine de Gas, nee Musson, came from there and his grandfather Germain Musson had made his fortune in Louisiana with the cotton trade. René de Gas, the painter's brother, had lived in New Orleans since 1865 and had married his American cousin Estelle Musson in 1869. The brother Achille de Gas had also moved to Louisiana in the late 1860s. Both brothers ran the wine trading company De Gas Frères, Importers of Wine in New Orleans .

When René de Gas visited Paris in 1872, Edgar Degas decided to accompany his brother on the way back to New Orleans. Both embarked on November 2, 1872 from Liverpool for New York . After twelve days of sea voyage and another 30 hours of rail travel, they reached New Orleans at the end of November. Edgar Degas sent a number of letters to France during his stay, which show how happy he was to meet family members. At the same time he complained about the hot, humid climate, the blinding light and the cultural wasteland in New Orleans. Nevertheless, he stayed in the city for several months and did not return to France until the end of March 1873. During his stay, he created numerous portraits of family members. The main work among these portraits is the painting The Cotton Office in New Orleans , which also shows people outside the family, but with the number of relatives depicted can still be considered a family portrait.

While Degas was still in New Orleans, his uncle Michel Musson had to announce the liquidation of the Musson, Livaudais, Prestidge and Co. company in the Daily Picayune newspaper . Degas' brother René holds a copy of this newspaper in his hands in the painting The Cotton Office in New Orleans . The author Marylin Ruth Brown suspects that the open newspaper in the center of the painting could possibly be an indication of the bankruptcy of the company. The turning away from each other by the three business partners, which is visible in the picture, can also be read as an indication of the company's bankruptcy. However, it remains unclear whether Degas actually intended to give the picture such a meaning or whether the details mentioned are only due to the composition of the picture.

Provenance

While still in New Orleans, Degas wrote in a letter to his painter colleague James Tissot on February 18, 1873 that he had painted the picture The Cotton Office in New Orleans specifically for the English market and that his local art dealer Thomas Agnew should send the painting to a textile entrepreneur sell from Manchester . Degas was thinking in particular of the spinning mill owner William Cottrill, who, however, had to sell his art collection in April 1873 for economic reasons. Degas initially failed to find a buyer for the painting and presented it to the public for the first time in 1876 when it was shown in Paris in the second group exhibition of the French Impressionists . Here it received mostly good reviews. However, his attempts to sell the picture initially failed. In 1878 he exhibited the painting in the salon of the Societé des Amis des Arts de Pau ( Association of Art Friends in Pau ). This annual exhibition was shown from January 15 to March 15, 1878 in the Musée des beaux-arts de Pau . Alphonse Cherfils, a friend of Degas from Pau, then negotiated with Charles Lecoeur, the museum's curator, to buy the painting. Degas, who had originally expected 5,000 francs , finally let himself be negotiated down to 2,000 francs. The purchase was made with funds from the Noulibos legacy . As can be seen from a letter to Lecoeur, Degas was delighted that a museum had acquired one of his paintings for the first time.

literature

  • Felix Baumann (ed.), Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits . Exhibition catalog Zurich and Tübingen. Merrell Holberton, London 1994, ISBN 1-85894-017-6 .
  • Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1988, ISBN 0-87099-519-7 .
  • Marilyn Ruth Brown: Degas and the business of art, a cotton office in New Orleans . Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1994, ISBN 0-271-00944-6 .
  • Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Classics and Experiment . Hirmer, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2439-2 .
  • Thomas L. Haskell, Richard F. Teichgraeber: The culture of the market, historical essays . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (England) / New York 1996, ISBN 0-521-44468-3 .
  • Paul-Andé Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre . P. Brame et CM de Hauke, Paris 1946–1949.
  • Melissa MacQuillan: Portrait Painting of the French Impressionists . Rosenheimer Verlagshaus, Rosenheim 1986, ISBN 3-475-52508-9 .
  • John Rewald: Degas and his family in New Orleans. In: Gazette des Beaux-Arts . Volume 30, 1946, pp. 105-126.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German picture titles, for example in Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Klassik und Experiment. P. 147.
  2. ^ French title in Paul-Andé Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre. P. 164, no. 320.
  3. ↑ Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Classic and Experiment. P. 147.
  4. ↑ Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Classic and Experiment. P. 147.
  5. ^ John Rewald: Degas and his family in New Orleans. P. 116.
  6. ↑ The name Degas was borne by the Italian branch of the family, including Edgar Degas' grandfather. Auguste's father switched to De Gas . This spelling, or the form de gas , was adopted by the French and American family members. Edgar Degas initially exhibited his pictures as Edgar de Gas and only later switched to Degas . See Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas. P. 21.
  7. ↑ Melissa MacQuillan: Portrait painting of the French impressionists. P. 80.
  8. ^ Paul-Andé Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre. P. 164, no. 320.
  9. ↑ Melissa MacQuillan: Portrait painting of the French impressionists. P. 80.
  10. ↑ Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Classic and Experiment. P. 149.
  11. ^ Felix Baumann, Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits. P. 201.
  12. ^ Felix Baumann, Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits. P. 202.
  13. ^ Marilyn Ruth Brown: Degas and the business of art, a cotton office in New Orleans. P. 32f.
  14. ↑ Alexander B. Eiling: Degas, Classic and Experiment. P. 149.
  15. ^ Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas. P. 186.
  16. ^ Thomas L. Haskell, Richard F. Teichgraeber: The culture of the market, historical essays. P. 266.
  17. ↑ For example, Marius Chaumelin praised the painting on April 8, 1876 in the newspaper La Gazette . Armand Silvestre was critical of the picture on April 2, 1876 in the newspaper L'Opinion . See Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas. P. 185.
  18. ↑ See the exhibition catalog of the Societé des Amis des Arts de Pau . Available online in the Bibliothèque nationale de France
  19. ^ Letter from Degas to Lecoeur of March 31, 1878 see Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas. P. 185.