Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Courtyard of a House (New Orleans, sketch)
Edgar Degas French
Not on view
Degas began this view from his family’s house soon after he arrived in New Orleans. Apart from the two cotton-office scenes, shown nearby, it is his only painting placed in a recognizably New Orleans setting. Notably, it is also his only visual record from that city of a Black figure, shown here as a nanny, despite the many Black people he observed and mentioned in letters. First shown in 1876, at the second Impressionist exhibition, this “sketch,” as it was called, went totally unnoticed by the critics, who focused their attention on Degas’s Cotton Office and his painting of a laundress with bare arms.
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