Madame René de Gas

When Degas reached New Orleans in the autumn of 1872, his cousin Estelle Musson was 29 and had already been widowed once. Her first husband, Joseph Davis Balfour, a nephew of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, was killed at the Battle of Corinth during the Civil War. She had since married Degas's younger brother René, and she was expecting a child. She was also losing her sight. "My poor Estelle is blind," Degas wrote to a friend, adding that she knew the rooms so well she hardly ever bumped into the furniture. He painted her in the family house on Esplanade Avenue with nothing in her hands and nothing beside her, her gaze turned aside and unfocused, the color held to soft pink and grey. The red "Degas" in the lower right corner was stamped on after his death, when the pictures still in his studio were sold in 1918.