The Impressionist Master Who Painted on Esplanade Avenue
In October 1872, one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art stepped off a ship in New Orleans. Edgar Degas — the French Impressionist master known for his paintings of ballet dancers, racehorses, and Parisian café life — had come to visit his mother's family, the Mussons, who were prominent cotton merchants in the Creole community. He would spend five months in the city, and the work he produced here would become some of the most important paintings of his career.
The Musson Family
Degas's mother, Célestine Musson, was born in New Orleans into a wealthy Creole family. She died when Edgar was thirteen, but the family connection remained strong. His uncle, Michel Musson, was a prosperous cotton factor who lived in a grand house on Esplanade Avenue — the Creole boulevard that runs from the French Quarter to Bayou St. John. It was in this house, and in the Musson cotton office on Carondelet Street, that Degas set up his easel and went to work.
A Cotton Office in New Orleans
"A Cotton Office in New Orleans," painted in 1873, is the masterpiece of Degas's New Orleans period and one of the landmark paintings of the nineteenth century. It depicts the interior of Michel Musson's cotton brokerage at 407 Carondelet Street — a room full of men in dark suits examining cotton samples, reading newspapers, and conducting business. The painting is remarkably modern in its composition — a slice of everyday commercial life captured with the same care and precision that Degas would later bring to his ballet scenes.
The painting was the first Impressionist work purchased by a museum — the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau, France, acquired it in 1878. It remains there today, a French masterpiece painted in New Orleans by an artist who was, through his mother's blood, half Creole.
The Esplanade Avenue House
Degas lived at 2306 Esplanade Avenue during his New Orleans stay, in a house that still stands and bears a historical marker noting his residence. From this address, he painted portraits of his Musson relatives, experimented with new techniques, and struggled with the New Orleans light — which he found overwhelming after the softer illumination of Paris. "The light is so strong that I have not been able to do anything on the river," he wrote. The subtropical intensity of Louisiana sunlight was, for an Impressionist painter obsessed with light and its effects, both a gift and a challenge.
What He Saw
Degas's New Orleans paintings reveal a city through a visitor's eyes — the interior life of a Creole household, the rhythm of commerce in a cotton exchange, the play of light through shuttered windows. He painted his cousin Estelle, who was blind, with a tenderness that suggests deep feeling. He painted the cotton office with the detachment of a social observer and the precision of a documentary filmmaker.
What he didn't paint is equally telling. He didn't paint the French Quarter. He didn't paint the river. He didn't paint the street life or the music or the food. Degas painted the private New Orleans — the domestic interiors, the family business, the world behind the shutters — because that was the New Orleans he had access to as a family member rather than a tourist.
The Legacy
The Degas House on Esplanade Avenue is now a museum and bed-and-breakfast — one of the few places in the world where you can sleep in the house where a major Impressionist master lived and worked. Degas left New Orleans in March 1873 and never returned, but the city had given him something that Paris couldn't: a view into a world completely different from his own, a world of cotton and Creole society and subtropical light that expanded his vision and produced some of his finest work.
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