Title: Cotton Merchants in New Orleans

Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)

Date: 1873

Geography: Country of Origin France

Culture: French

Medium: Oil on linen

Dimensions: 23 1/8 × 28 1/4 in. (58.7 × 71.8 cm)
Frame: 32 15/16 × 38 3/16 × 3 in. (83.7 × 97 × 7.6 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Herbert N. Straus (1929.90)


In a letter from New Orleans to James Tissot, Degas wrote, “I am preparing another [painting], less complicated and more spontaneous, better art, where the people are wearing summer dress, white walls, a sea of cotton on the tables.” Set in a light and airy space centered on a bed of tactile cotton, this breezy composition captures the casual transaction of business in the New Orleans office of the artist’s uncle, Michel Musson. One imagines that this is the “Louisiana art” Degas aimed to create, as mentioned in his letters. The seascape on the wall calls attention to the transatlantic trade of cotton, in which his brothers were directly involved as owners of a firm that purchased the raw material on behalf of French merchants.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/844642