In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old

Abstract

Edgar Degas’s stay in New Orleans in 1872–73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the French textiles he frequently depicted and to his works’ paper supports demonstrates the centrality of the material to the artist’s corpus. More broadly, Degas’s cotton office paintings, as well as drawings and letters produced during his time abroad, reflect his meditation on the connections that bound the Old and New Worlds together and the transportation technology that facilitated the global circulation of people, goods, and communications.

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