Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Cotton Merchants in New Orleans
Edgar Degas French
Not on view
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.
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