A Cotton Office in New Orleans, also known as Interior of an Office of Cotton Buyers in New Orleans and Portraits in an Office (New Orleans), is an oil painting by Edgar Degas. Degas depicts the interior of his maternal uncle Michel Musson's cotton firm in New Orleans. Musson, Degas's brothers René and Achille, Musson's son-in-law William Bell, and other associates of Musson are shown engaged in various business and leisure activities while raw cotton rests on a table in the middle of the office.
Degas created the painting in the early part of 1873 during an extended visit with family in New Orleans. His trip coincided with the political turbulence of Reconstruction. Degas exhibited the work at the 1876 Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. Degas hoped to sell the painting to a textile manufacturer in Manchester but was unsuccessful. A Cotton Office in New Orleans was eventually sold in 1878 to the Municipal Museum in Pau, France. Degas was the only major French Impressionist to travel to the United States and paint US subjects.
Background
Family ties to New Orleans and visit
Edgar Degas had familial ties to Creole New Orleans. Germain Musson, Degas's maternal grandfather, was born of French descent in Port-Au-Prince. In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, he relocated in 1810 to New Orleans where he established himself as a cotton exporter. Musson married Marie Céleste Désirée Rillieux who was from a prominent Creole family. They had five New Orleans-born children including Degas's mother, Marie-Célestine Musson, and Michel Musson. After his wife died in 1819, Germain Musson moved his family to Paris. He relocated back to New Orleans after the 1832 marriage of his daughter Marie-Célestine to Auguste Degas. When Edgar was born, Auguste arranged the purchase of a New Orleans cottage in his son's name.
Edgar Degas made his first and only trip to the United States and the birthplace of his mother in the fall of 1872 at the behest of his brother René. René at the time was running a cotton brokerage in New Orleans with their other brother Achille. René had married his first cousin Estelle Musson, daughter of Michel Musson. Before he left for New Orleans, Edgar was at an artistic crossroads. He was still uncertain about focusing his painting on contemporary subjects and had not yet found much success selling his art.
During his stay in New Orleans, Edgar Degas resided in Michel Musson's rented mansion in the Garden District. Degas lived with his uncle; René, Estelle and their family; Michel Musson's other two daughters (one of whom was married to businessman William Bell) and their families. He spent much time painting these family members, especially Estelle. However, Degas expressed dissatisfaction with this work in letters to his friends Henri Rouart and James Tissot.
Michel Musson and his partners ran a cotton factoring firm whose office was in close proximity to Achille and René's business. William Bell and his business partner Frederick Nash Ogden worked in the cotton trade close by. Degas would spend some time each day in his brothers' office receiving and responding to mail, reading newspapers, and overhearing his brothers' and their associates' commercial conversations. Degas would write to Tissot that, in New Orleans, "One speaks of nothing but cotton."
Cotton, slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction
The production and sale of cotton was vital to the Antebellum Southern US economy. It was also inextricably linked to slavery in the United States. During the Civil War, cotton played a pivotal role in the Confederacy's diplomatic strategy. New Orleans stood at the heart of the cotton and slave trades as both the United States' most important cotton port and its largest slave market. Despite emancipation and the end of the plantation-slave complex in 1865, newly freed black farmers were still the main labor force in cotton production and were subjected to oppressive sharecropping systems and continued political persecution during Reconstruction.
Members of the Musson and Degas families owned slaves, supported the Confederacy, and had ties to and participated in white supremacist groups during Reconstruction. Germain and Michel Musson both owned slaves. Edgar Degas's mother had her dowry increased by her father's sale of a young slave girl. Michel Musson, Auguste and René Degas invested in confederate bonds. In 1873, Musson was briefly a supporter of the Louisiana Unification Movement, which sought interracial cooperation and public integration. However, he, René Degas, William Bell, and Bell's associate Frederick Nash Ogden, became members and leaders of the White League and would participate in the Battle of Liberty Place.