Although Degas planned many ambitious projects, he did not follow many of the plans to the point of execution. The work Degas completed while in New Orleans does not reflect the curiosity and excitement that we see in his correspondence. One of the theories behind his lack of production is the bright sunlight s affect on his eyes. Degas often complained that the intense sunlight along the banks of the Mississippi aggravated his eyesight. This suggests that he worked or intended to work outdoors. The aggravated condition of his eyes explains the lack of open-air paintings he did while in New Orleans. However, the lack of this type of painting should not come as a complete surprise because Degas never really concentrated on this theme. Out of all of the Impressionist painters Degas s body of work contains the least amount of open-air paintings. Through Degas letters and his work done in New Orleans it is evident that he spent much of his time in the mansion on Esplenade, painting portraits of his American cousins. Degas complained in his letters about the difficulty of family portraits. Family portraits must be done to suit the taste of the family, in impossible lighting, with many interruptions, and with models who are very affectionate but a little too bold-they take you much less seriously because you are their nephew or cousin (Benfey pg. 91). Degas displeasure with doing portraits of family members certainly did not affect the quality of his work. Each portrait of his three cousins: Desiree, Mathilde, and Estelle are among the masterpieces he completed while in New Orleans. Although the content of these portraits does not represent any significant artistic growth, this was a time of great style experimentation for Degas. Degas paints each of his three cousins in an inventive way that allows him to go beyond painting their individual features and allows him to create an image of a certain social type.Degas portrait of Desiree Musson, titled Women with a Vase of Flowers c. 1872, experiments with a decentralized composition. Degas was very much influenced by Japanese prints, in which decentralization was a key theme. In many of his works dating as early as 1868(The Orchestra of the Opera c. 1868), Degas uses them to gain new ideas about perspective and composition (McMullen pg. 178). In Women with a Vase of Flowers c. 1872 we are able to see the effect Japanese prints had on Degas style. In this work, the composition s focus is split between the vase of flowers and Desiree. He divides the space of the painting using the shaded corner of the room. Desiree resides in the lighter half of the painting, while the flowers are against the background of the shadowed wall. Degas puts the flowers in the forefront of the picture, placing Desiree behind the flowers. The vase takes up approximately as much space as Desiree and the green leaves invade her space, dangling across her breast and elbow. Degas lets the viewer debate whether the painting is a still life with the vase of flowers as its central focus or a portrait with Desiree as the central focus. This portrait reveals the experimentation that Degas was attempting in his portraiture. Degas style was expanding beyond the stiff techniques of the academic style of portraiture. Another significant aspect of this work is Degas expanded palette of colors. The range of colors that we see in this work is a dramatic change from the brown earthy tones that we previously saw in Degas portraits of his two brothers. The painting is given a tropical resonance by the jade green wall, the purple blue vase, and the orange red flowers. The contrast of Desiree s pale skin against the jade green wall creates a beautiful contrast. The oranges, reds, blues, and greens that Degas uses in this painting show the expanded palette of colors that Degas introduces into his portraits during this period.Degas use of sunlight and shadow are also very effective in Desiree s portrait. The sunlight comes in from the left of the room and illuminates Desiree s white muslin dress and her left cheek. A little more than half of Desiree s face is clearly visible, the remaining portion is darkened by a shadow. The two sides are contrasted by both the ways the light falls upon them and their expression. The side that the sun shines on is bright and smiling, while the other is shadowed and not smiling. The shaded face of Desiree acts as a visual metaphor for Degas prospective of the Creole s precarious existence in New Orleans. On the surface, in the sunlight, the Creoles of New Orleans still made up the social elite. But underneath, in the shadow of the visual splendor of the Creole s exquisite social balls and Mardi Gras, the foundations of the Creole aristocracy were crumbling. The civil war and the Reconstruction policies that followed it had a tremendous effect on the Creole way of life. As a result of their Confederate service, nearly all Creole men were barred from participating in city and state government affairs. In their place came many northern businessmen, carpetbaggers, eager for an opportunity to control the valuable port city. These men did not care to maintain any of the Creole traditions, and for the most part only cared for the personal profits they could make off the city. Many Creole men fought for the old way of life, among these men were Degas brothers. Renee De Gas was chairman of the White League and helped organize an armed protest in 1877 (Benfey pg. 189). The protest would eventually lead to the Compromise of 1874, the restoration of home rule in Louisiana. During Degas visit he was able to experience first hand the conflicts that were dividing the city and his Creole family. Degas incorporates his experience and knowledge of the complex Degas portrait of his second cousin, Mathilde Bell titled Woman Seated near a Balcony c. 1872, is set on the balcony of the Musson mansion on Esplenade. Again, Degas positions his subject slightly off the center of the painting. By placing her in this position, Degas provides us with a larger area to view the balcony that is behind her. Degas does this to stress the significance of the setting. The balconies in New Orleans had a special function in the lives of the city s women. Most of the Creole women of New Orleans would not venture out of their homes without the accompaniment of a chaperone or husband. Thus, these balconies provided the women with an easily accessible place to sit and watch the hustle and bustle of the streets below. These intimate, half-private spaces, neither entirely inside nor outside provided a place to view passing parades, socialize with friends, and cool off during steamy days. Edward King, a journalist who visited the city in 1873, admired the daughters of Creoles on the balconies, gaily chatting while the veil of twilight is torn away, and the glory of the southern moonlight is showered over the quiet streets (Benfey pg. 93). Everything from the setting that Degas paints Mathilde Bell in to the way she dresses typifies the aristocratic Creole woman. Her dress with its low slung bodice and waist decorated with orange ribbons was at the height of Creole fashion. The black choker she wears starkly contrasts Mathilde s pale skin. The paleness of her skin was a result of the extremely sheltered lives Creole women led. Creole women always wore veils outdoors, to insure that their skin remained milky white, thus they would never be mistaken for a person of mixed race. In Woman Seated near a Balcony, Degas captures more than just the physical characteristics of his cousin. The painting captures a contemporary class, the Creole women of New Orleans. In this work, Degas progression to blending his realist style with contemporary themes is evident. From the first days of her visit to France years earlier, Estelle de Gas fascinated Edgar. Degas had comforted her when she had lost her husband years before and now as opthalmia had taken her sight, he related to her on an even deeper level. Degas had become increasingly worried about the condition of his eyes and in Estelle he found someone who could relate to his fears. Degas mentioned Estelle in almost every letter, concentrating on her blindness. She bears her blindness in an incomparable manner, he noted; she needs scarcely any help about the house. She remembers the rooms and the position of the furniture and hardly ever bumps into anything. And there is no hope! (Benfey pg. 96) The portrait of Estelle, Mme. Renee De Gas c. 1872, certainly reflects Degas special concern for her. In his depiction of her, we can see some of the anxiety that Degas has about his own eyes. Degas places Estelle to one side of the painting, awkwardly sitting on a chaise long, and surrounded by an eerie reddish background with no props or furniture. Her off center position and her blank surroundings duplicate for the viewer the disorientation a blind person must feel. Degas use of muted colors and light tones also create a sense that she is surrounded by a void. Degas mimics the French painting tradition of a woman seductively reclining on a sofa. Instead of having Estelle seductively lying on it, as Ingres has his model in Grande Odalisque c. 1814, he has her anxiously sitting on the edge of the couch. As she gazes off into nowhere, her expression is expectant. She seems unaware of what is about to happen. One senses that Degas uses Estelle as the physical representation of his anxiety about his own condition.When looking at the portraits that Degas completed while in New Orleans, one could make the argument that Degas spent his visit holed up in the Musson Mansion impervious to all the external sensations the city had to offer. But, that would be only examining the issue on a surface level. It is true Degas did not paint the exotic scenery he talks about in his letters. His eye problems, no doubt real, gave him a ready excuse to avoid plein air painting. He often suggests that his impressionist colleagues Manet or Delacroix could have captured the exotic city far better. However, by concentrating on things he had an intimate knowledge of, he was able to paint a deeper portrait of the troubled society he found in New Orleans. Degas portraits of his American cousins capture people that Degas had a deep knowledge and understanding of. By capturing these women, Degas managed to capture the essence of the class they belonged to. These portraits reveal more about the complicated society of New Orleans than images of the exotic surface of the city ever could.The progression of Degas portraiture is strikingly illustrated in one of his greatest masterpieces, Absinthe c. 1876. Painted shortly after his return to Paris, Absinthe symbolizes the culmination of the stylistic advances that Degas made while in New Orleans. Degas portraits of his Creole cousins served as rehearsals, that could be kept within the family, for masterpieces that would be painted upon his return to Paris. In the works painted after New Orleans, Degas focuses on themes that for him define Paris. These themes include caf scenes, Parisian laundresses and ballet rehearsals. Absinthe is set in the Caf de la Nouvelle Athenes, a hang out for Degas and many of his Impressionist cohorts. Degas places his model, an attractive stage celebrity, at one end of a long marble table behind a glass of Absinthe (Feilchenfeldt pg. 49). Degas depicts her as a weary prostitute who has come in off the street for a drink and a few minutes rest. She stares blankly into space, lost in a brief moment of rest. Her body, shoulders hunched forward, has the same weary expression as her face. Degas isolates her by having the person seated next to her, who looks as if he is a lush, turned in the opposite direction. By doing this, Degas really emphasizes her degradation. Degas goes beyond her individual features by emphasizing her particular attitude, reflected in her expression, her body language and her setting. He emphasizes this attitude to such a degree as to create an image of a certain Parisian type rather than a portrait of a young woman. Just as in the portraits of his Creole cousins, Degas uses everything contained within the frame to record a social type. Works such as are fine representations of the realism of Degas. One does nothing here, it lies in the climate, nothing but cotton, one lives for cotton and from cotton. -Degas in a letter to Henri RouartAfter two months in New Orleans, Degas longed for something to break the monotony of painting family portraits in the Esplenade mansion. His frustrations with his models and the lighting in New Orleans are reflected in his correspondence with Tissot, After having wasted time in the family trying to do portraits in the worst conditions I have ever found or imagined, I have attached myself to a fairly vigorous picture (Benfey pg. 155). The vigorous picture that Degas speaks of is the one that is most commonly linked with his trip to New Orleans, A Cotton Office in New Orleans 1872. Essentially, it is another family portrait and just as in the works we have discussed early Degas picks the setting that best suits his models. Both the men of the De Gas and Musson family were heavily involved in the cotton trade. Degas everyday routine included a trip to his brothers office to pick up his mail and to read the newspaper. He had listened for months to his brothers speculatively talk about the prices of cotton and he had often remarked in his letters of how dull he found their incessant chatter. He wrote in one of his letters, One has to be in the everlasting cotton trade otherwise beware (Benfey pg. 152). It was during one of his daily visits to the office that the routine he once considered dull became a subject that aroused his intuition for the contemporary. The cotton office was a fresh slice of modern life; a contemporary scene that perfectly reflected life in New Orleans during the 1870 s. In A Cotton Office in New Orleans c. 1873, we are in the commercial Faubourg Sainte Marie quarter, looking in to the office of Michel Musson. Sunlight fills the crowded office, as men hurry about analyzing and processing the latest cotton samples. In this passage, taken from a letter to Tissot, Degas provides us a brief description of the painting: In it there are about 15 individuals more or less occupied with a table covered with the precious material and two men, one half leaning and the other half sitting on it, the buyer and the broker, are discussing the sample (Benfey pg. 155). Degas does not mention to Tissot that nearly all of the individuals pictured in the piece are his relatives. In the immediate foreground is the patriarch of Degas New Orleans family, Michel Musson. Michel peers over his glasses, casually testing the quality of a cotton sample. Behind him, Renee smokes a cigarette while reading the local Picayune. To the far left of Renee, Achille leans cross-legged against a windowsill. Apparently, either things were not too busy at the De Gas office or the brothers came to the office to pose for their eldest brother. Nearly all of the other models in the office are cousins or are of some relation to Degas. The style of the painting is reminiscent of Degas great portraits of the 1860 s. Degas reverts back to the simple and bold qualities of the French Naturalist movement (McMullen pg. 239). The style of the painting very much resembles his portrait of the Bellili family. The faces of the models in this work have a much more photographic quality than the faces of his female cousins in his other New Orleans portraits. He spares no detail in each individual portrait. At first glance, the painting has the cold look of a snapshot, but on a closer investigation the less photographic it appears.Degas masterfully uses the space and the architectural details of the office to frame the scene. Using a camera like angle, he allows for us to see everything in the office with the utmost clarity. The men and objects in the back of the room recede with a photographic lack of constancy scaling Life 239. He goes to the extent of letting the viewer see through the open windows of the office into the adjoining office. Degas was insistent on depicting people in their usual settings and he successfully does this in this work. His strong draftsmanship is reflected in his ability to record the complicated mesh of architectural detail without making the layout seem cluttered.With its carefully choreographed interaction among its figures, A Cotton Office in New Orleans looks forward to Degas ballet paintings. The painting s spatial layout foreshadows the superb draftsmanship we would see in some of the first ballet rehearsal paintings. In The Rehearsal of the Ballet on the Stage c. 1874, Degas uses a similar angle to show us the action. We are slightly above the scene looking down on the action. Again, Degas uses the photographic lack of constancy scaling to effectively show the dancers in the background. The seemingly random positions of the characters throughout the office remind us of look forward to the chaotic ballet rehearsals Degas would go on to paint. The figures in the office are grouped in configurations that very much resemble the positions Degas would later show his ballet students in. Although the draftsmanship of A Cotton Office in New Orleans looks forward to Degas ballet paintings, the naturalist style it was in was a throwback to his earlier works. The work that best reflects the stylistic progression of Degas is Cotton Merchants in New Orleans c. 1873. Degas describes this work in his correspondence, less complicated and more spontaneous, of a better art, where people are in summer dress, white walls, a sea of cotton on the tables (Benfey pg. 157). The fact that Degas refers to this as better art reveals to us he believed his art was progressing. The painting totally departs from the naturalistic style Degas uses in A Cotton Office. Degas style is much more impressionistic in this work; he is much more suggestive, every detail is not revealed. Degas quick handling of gesture and light in this light airy composition looks forward to the stylistic mode that Degas would follow for the following years. Works such as At the Caf Concert: The Song of the Dog 1875, Women Ironing 1884, and Dancers, Pink and Green c. 1890 reflect this stylistic progression. Everything is beautiful in this world of the people. But one Paris laundry girl, with bare arms, is worth it all for such a pronounced Parisian as I am. -Degas in a letter to FrolichDuring his last months in New Orleans Degas often complained in his correspondence about being homesick for Paris. No longer enchanted with his exotic surroundings, he longed to return to his native home. In his last letters from New Orleans, Degas seems rather determined that his lack of native knowledge prevented him from really capturing the essence of New Orleans. I no longer want to see anything except my own corner. I want to dig in it piously. You don t expand art; you sum it up. Unable to expand his art to encompass the exotiscm of New Orleans, Degas was anxious to return home and attempt to capture his native city, to sum it up as he explains. His desire to return to his own corner reflects the frustration he obviously felt during his time in New Orleans. Out of all of this Impressionist colleagues, Degas felt he was the least suited to record the exotic flavor of New Orleans. Manet, more than me, would have seen beautiful things here. But he wouldn t have made anything more out of them. In art you love and you produce only what you are used to (McMullen pg. 236). By confining his work to things he had an intimate knowledge of, Degas limited himself almost exclusively to family portraits. One should not underestimate how his frustration affected his work, when Degas returned to Paris he was determined to concentrate on themes that were native to him, Parisian themes. In mid March of 1873, Degas departed New Orleans. Curiously, he brought all of his New Orleans works with him, not offering any to his models. Even though Degas was frustrated by his lack of output in New Orleans, he left with a positive attitude. More importantly Degas brought with him a new resolve about his work, his career, and his future. I have made certain good resolutions which I honestly feel capable of carrying out. If I could have another 20 years time to work I would do things that would endure. -Degas in a letter to TissotEdgar Degas four-month sojourn in New Orleans was a critical moment in his career. A moment of experimentation and self-examination, he desperately needed in order to realize his future promise. His artistic progression can be seen in the changes that occurred in both the style and the content of his work. Through his experimentation with portraiture, Degas began not to concentrate as much on the faithful representation of his individual models, but began to perceive and to render some of the typical characteristics of the social, professional and human types that surrounded him. His ability to capture the essence of these types is at the heart of his realism. Through his portraits of his Creole cousins, we can see how Degas began to use his models surroundings, expressions, body language, and position within the picture to express something greater than just a physical representation. The painting style of Degas also experienced a profound change during his visit to New Orleans. Cotton Merchants in New Orleans shows a definite change from the simple lines of naturalism that is present in many of his previous works to a more loosely handed style of painting. The light airy composition foreshadowed the style of painting that Degas would use for the following years. Most of all, New Orleans was a time of self-examination for Degas. Degas returned to Paris with the resolution to paint things that he loved and knew. Through his correspondence, Degas reveals to us that although he was mesmerized by the exotic qualities of New Orleans, his lack of a deep knowledge of his surroundings prevented him from really capturing the city. Instead, Degas focused on portraits of his intimates, and through these portraits we are presented with an insightful examination of the Creole social class. It was not Degas ambition to present his viewers with slick images of exoticism, for instantaneous impressions are merely photographic.