A Cotton Office in New Orleans

In the winter of 1872 Degas sailed to New Orleans with his brother to visit their mother's family, who were in the cotton trade. Stuck there longer than planned in 1873, he painted this to fill the time, and set it inside his uncle Michel Musson's cotton office. It is an unusually documentary picture for Degas, more than a dozen men at work, one testing a handful of raw cotton, another reading a newspaper, ledgers open, his brother René lounging against a table. Degas hoped to sell it to a British cotton manufacturer, and there is a business logic to how carefully everyone is shown doing their job. In 1878 the small museum in Pau, in southern France, bought it, the first work by Degas to enter any museum, and the first by an Impressionist. Musson's own firm went under in a cotton crash not long after.