Degas and the business of art: a cotton office in New Orleans 9780271009445

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page vii)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (page ix)
INTRODUCTION (page 1)
I The Cotton Office in New Orleans and a Potential Patron in Manchester (page 15)
II The Exhibition in Paris (page 59)
III The Cotton Office in Pau (page 83)
IV An Entrepreneur in Spite of Himself (page 117)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 141)
INDEX (page 153)

Citation preview

Degas and the Business of Art

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MARILYN R. BROWN

Degas and the Business of Art A Cotton Office in New Orleans

Published for

COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION

0 oe PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA 1994

Monographs on the Fine Arts sponsored by COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION Volume LI

Editor, Nicholas Adams . Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Marilyn. Degas and the business of art : A cotton office in New Orleans / Marilyn R. Brown.

p- cm.—(Monographs on the fine arts ; v. $1) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-271-00944-6

1. Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917. Cotton merchants in New Orleans. 2. Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917—-Criticism and interpretation. I. Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917. II. Title. JI. Series: Monographs on the fine ° arts ; $I.

ND553.D3C68 1994 : 759.4——dc20 92-34466 CIP

Copyright © 1994 College Art Association, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, Barbara Building, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy

the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z239.481984.

FRONTISPIECE: Edgar Degas, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873, oil on

canvas, 73 X 92 cm. Pau, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Contents LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Vil

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1X

INTRODUCTION I

I The Cotton Office in New Orleans and a Potential

Patron in Manchester 15 II The Exhibition in Paris 59

Ill The Cotton Office in Pau 83 IV An Entrepreneur in Spite of Himself 117

INDEX 153

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY IAI

V

List o| ist of Illustrations FRONTISPIECE: Degas, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, Tulane University (photo: Tulane

Orleans, 1873, oil on canvas, 73 X 92 cm. Pau, University Art Collection)

Musée des Beaux-Arts Ir. Janet-Lange, “La Culture du coton aux Etats1. Degas, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873, Unis,” illustration from L’I[lustration, xxxIx oil on canvas, 73 X 92 cm. Pau, Musée des (March 22, 1862), p. 180 (photo: Rare

Beaux-Arts Books, Tulane University Library, New

2. Rembrandt, Syndics of the Amsterdam Cloth Orleans)

Guild, 1662, oil on canvas, 191.5 X 279 cm. 12. Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, 1876,

Amsterdam, Ryksmuseum oil on canvas, 61.2 X 96.8 cm. Los Angeles, 3. Degas, The Cotton Merchants, 1873, 011 on Los Angeles County Museum of Art canvas, §8.42 X 71.12 cm. Cambridge, 13. James Tissot, Le Cercle de la rue Royale, 1868, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard oil on canvas, 215.9 X 330.2 cm. Paris,

University, gift of Herbert N. Straus private collection (photo: courtesy Michael 4. Exterior of Factors’ Row, 407 (formerly 63) Wentworth) Carondelet Street, New Orleans (photo: 14. Eyre Crowe, The Dinner Hour, Wigan, 1874,

author) oil on canvas, 76.3 X 107 cm. Manchester,

5. Illustration of Factors and Traders’ Insurance City Art Galleries

Company, from Edwin L. Jewell, Crescent 15. Illustration of “Sketches at a Manchester City Illustrated (New Orleans, 1873), p. 343 Cotton Factory: First Process, the Opener;

(photo: Louisiana Collection, Tulane Last Process, the Loom; Dinner Time,” from University Library, New Orleans) The Graphic, October 26, 1872, p. 391 6. Illustration of the old New Orleans Cotton (photo: Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris) Exchange building, from Edwin L. Jewell, 16. Engraving after Edmond Castan’s painting Crescent City Illustrated (New Orleans, 1873), Our Pets, illustration from “Selected Pictures. p. 274 (photo: Louisiana Collection, Tulane From the Picture in the Collection of W.

University Library, New Orleans) Cottrill, Esq., Higher Broughton,” The Art 7. Illustration of the interior of the new New Journal, new series, X (1871), opposite p. 36 Orleans Cotton Exchange building, from (photo: Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris) Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 24, 17. Engraving after John Faed’s painting Within a

1883 (photo: Louisiana Collection, Tulane Mile of Edinbro’ Town, illustration from

University Library, New Orleans) “Selected Pictures. From the Picture in the 8. Former premises of Musson, Prestidge, and Collection of W. Cottrill, Esq., Singleton Company as they appeared in 1975 (photo: House, Higher Broughton,” The Art Journal, Ronn Todd, courtesy The Times-Picayune, new series, XI (1872), opposite p. 68 (photo:

New Orleans) Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris)

9. Former premises of Musson, Prestidge, and 18. Claude Monet, La Grenoutllére, 1869, oil on Company as they appeared in 1980 (photo: canvas, 74.6 X 99.7 cm. New York, The

author) Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of

10. Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron, Large Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.112),

Steamboats at the Levee in New Orleans, 1853, The H. O. Havemeyer Collection oil on canvas, 123.2 X 183.5 cm. New 19. Gustave Caillebotte, Floor-scrapers, 1875, oil Vil

List of Illustrations

on canvas, 100 X 145.4 cm. Paris, Musée 1889, graphite drawing (photo: courtesy

d’Orsay (photo: Musées Nationaux) Jean-Paul Lafond)

20. Degas, Laundress (Silhouette), c. 1874, oil on 34. Paul Lafond, Portrait of Emile Noulibos, after

canvas, $4.3 X 39.4 cm. New York, The 1878, etching. Pau, Bibliothéque Municipale Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of 35. Degas, Sulking (The Banker), c. 1873-74, oil Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100. 46), on canvas, 32.4 X 46.4 cm. New York, The

The H. O. Havemeyer Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of 21. Bertall, “Miss Diana Vernon de I’Ohio,” Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100. 43), illustration from La Vie hors de chez soi The H. O. Havemeyer Collection (Paris, 1876), plate 34 (photo: Dana 36. Degas, Portrait of Henri Rouart in Front of His

Sherman) Factory, c. 1875, oil on canvas, 65.6 X 50.5

22. Bertall, “Un Naturel du pays,” illustration cm. Pittsburgh, The Carnegie Museum of from La Vie hors de chez soi (Paris, 1876), Art; acquired through the generosity of the

plate 36 (photo: Dana Sherman) Sarah Mellon Scaife Family, 69.44 23. Bertall, “Attention!”, vignette from La Vie 37. Illustration of the Louisiana Ice Works, from hors de chez soi (Paris, 1876), p. 229 (photo: Edwin L. Jewell, Crescent City Illustrated

Dana Sherman) (New Orleans, 1873), p. 101 (photo:

24. Auguste Rousselin, Portrait of Charles Le Louisiana Collection, Tulane University, Coeur, 1869, oil on canvas, 82 X 65 cm. Pau, New Orleans)

Musée des Beaux-Arts 38. Degas, Portrait of Hermann de Clermont, c. 25. Théodule Ribot, The Good Samaritan, 1870- 1876-79, black chalk with white highlights 75, oil on canvas, 98 X 131 cm. Pau, Musée on blue paper, 48 X 31.5 cm. Copenhagen,

des Beaux-Arts Statens Museum for Kunst (photo: Hans

26. Eugéne Boudin, The Port of Bordeaux, 1874, Petersen)

oil on wood, 22 X 36 cm. Pau, Musée des 39. Degas, Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, 1879,

Beaux-Arts oil on canvas, 100 X 82 cm. Paris, Musée 27. Victor Galos, The Stream of Pau, c. 1870s, oil d’Orsay (photo: Musées Nationaux) on wood, 19 X 38 cm. Pau, Musée des 40. Honoré Daumier, Robert Macaire Boursier,

Beaux-Arts 1837, lithograph, 22.8 X 21 cm. Paris,

28. Camille Pissarro, A Morning in June, Seen Bibliothéque Nationale

jrom the Heights of Pontoise, 1873, oil on 41. Degas, Pauline and Virginie Conversing with canvas, §4.5 X 91 cm. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Admirers (for La Famille Cardinal by Ludovic

Kunsthalle Halévy), c. 1876-83, monotype, 21.5 X 16

29. Louise Abbéma, The Luncheon in the cm. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art

Conservatory, 1877, oil on canvas, 194 X 308 Museum, Harvard University, Bequest of

cm. Pau, Musée des Beaux-Arts Meta and Paul J. Sachs

30. Alphonse-Louis Galbrund, Réverie, before 42. Degas, In the Salon, c. 1879-80, monotype,

1878, oil on canvas, 105 X 82 cm. Pau, 15.9 X 21.6 cm. Paris, Musée Picasso (photo:

Musée des Beaux-Arts Musées Nationaux)

31. Degas, Les Amateurs, c. 1878-81, oil on oak 43. Degas, The Madam’s Birthday, c. 1879-80,

panel, 27.3 X 35.2 cm. Cleveland, The monotype, II.§ X 15.9 cm. location Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of unknown [Janis no. 88] Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Fund, 58.25 44. Degas, The Millinery Shop, c. 1882-86, oil 32. Charles Durand, called Carolus-Duran, on canvas, 100 X 110.7 cm. Chicago, The Portrait of Alphonse Cherfils, 1871, oil on Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. canvas, §8 X 43 cm. Pau, Musée des Beaux- Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection,

Arts 1933.428, photograph © 1992, The Art

33. Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Paul Lafond, c. Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Vill

Acknowledgments N THE INTEREST of questioning cultural hierarchies of the center and the “margins,” this book

| ei among other things, the intersection of the mainstream and the provincial through the agency of the market. In examining the heterogeneous audiences for one painting, it brings together many of my concerns as a social historian of French art who happens to be a Southern American. My writing was done primarily in New Orleans, the only city that, to my knowledge, celebrates Degas’s birthday as a municipal holiday. The research was a tale of four cities and I have people to thank in each of them. In New Orleans I would like to thank: Wilbur Meneray and Joan Caldwell of Special Collections and the Louisiana Collection, Tulane University Library; Harry Redman, Jr., of

the Tulane French Department; Lawrence Powell of the Tulane History Department; Richard Teichgraeber of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane; Valerie Olsen, formerly of the

New Orleans Museum of Art; Joseph Newell, formerly of the Vieux Carré Commission; Nancy Burris of the Times-Picayune; J. B. Harter of the Louisiana State Museum; photographer Ron Todd; artist David Wheeler; Thomas Bayer of the Fine Arts Gallery; and the staffs of: the Louisiana Collection, Tulane University Library; the Louisiana Room, New Orleans Public Library; and the Historic New Orleans Collection. In Manchester I owe thanks to Julian Treuherz of the City Art Gallery, to Richard Thomson of the University of Manchester, and to the staff of the Local History Collection, Manchester Public Library. In Paris I would like to thank the late archivist Pierre Angrand; Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy of the Archives Durand-Ruel; Henri Loyrette of the Musée d’Orsay; and artist David Webster. In Pau Iam thankful to Christine Juliat, Archiviste municipale; Robert Radix, president of the Société des Amis des Arts; and Philippe Comte, Conservateur, Musée des Beaux-Arts. I also want to thank Barbara Rust of the National Archives, Fort Worth Branch; Rebecca DeMuth, Pittsburgh; James Byrnes, Los Angeles; and Michael Wentworth, Boston.

I would like to offer my special gratitude to descendants of several of the principal figures involved in my research: the late M. Jean-Paul Lafond of Navarrenx, France, grandson of Paul Lafond; Judge Marcel Livaudais, Jr., of New Orleans and Alice Livaudais Pipes of Calhoun, Louisiana, the ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter of John E. Livaudais; Cottrill descendants John H.

Cottrill and Eileen Kirkwood of Manchester, England; and Edmund Martin of Lynchburg, Virginia, great-grandson of René DeGas and Estelle Musson. Iam especially grateful to Eunice Lipton and Richard Thomson for reading earlier drafts of the manuscript and to Teresa Toulouse, Graeme Forbes, and Hollis Clayson for making editorial suggestions. Eunice Lipton in particular provided generous moral support. Revisions were undertaken in part at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, for whose facilities I am likewise grateful. A different version of Chapter 4 is being published by the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane University in an interdisciplinary volume of essays entitled The Culture of the Market (Cambridge University Press, 1993). I am thankful to the editors, 1X

Acknowledgments

Richard Teichgraeber and Thomas Haskell, for permission to use those materials in a different form here, and to other members of the Murphy Institute’s faculty seminar on the culture of the market, spring 1990, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Robert Herbert, Theodore Reff, Robert Rosenblum, and George Shackelford also offered invaluable help at various stages. Without the support of editors Beatrice Reh] and Nicholas Adams, the manuscript probably would never have been published. Nicholas Adams’s editorial suggestions were refreshingly sensible, and Virginia Wageman and Cherene Holland expedited the process of publication.

Research and writing were funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Tulane University Committee on Research, to whom I am most grateful. Finally, I would like to thank colleagues, friends, and family for their encouragement, especially Graeme Forbes for his sense of humor. The book is dedicated to my teachers: Virginia Rembert and Robert Herbert. New Orleans, August 1992

x

Introducti

N LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, Edgar Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans (Fig. 1),1 painted in New Orleans in 1873 and purchased by the museum in Pau, France, in 1878, enjoys

a popular, if rather inflated, reputation as “the greatest single masterwork produced on these shores.”? The painting’s reputation, like that of Impressionism in general, has until fairly recently been enhanced by a modernist myth of early public rejection. But, as recent studies of the criticism of Impressionism have suggested, nineteenth-century audiences actually saw more to like than to dislike in this particular canvas.3 Even as Degas was painting A Cotton Office in New Orleans, he specifically intended the picture

for a projected future sale and took the marketing of cotton in New Orleans as both subject and commercial paradigm. But he encountered unforeseen complications; and by the time he eventually succeeded in the venture, the market, audience, and, apparently, the messages of his picture had shifted. As the artist’s negotiations with the business of art became increasingly complex, the marketing and public reception of A Cotton Office inflected and multiplied its meanings. As an art historian residing in New Orleans, where Degas’s work is a living part of local history and provides a perennial topic of conversation, my interest in undertaking an extended study of this painting was sparked not so much by the question of whether or not it was or is a “masterpiece,” but rather by questions about its contradictory historical meanings within changing social circumstances. I came to the topic both as a curious citizen of the city in which the painting was produced and as someone involved in recent debates over the nature of the interpretation of works of art. I

worked from the premise that the making of a picture is a complex process: not simply a direct 1. The title of the painting has varied. For the sake of de 1878,” opposite p. 14. It was perhaps the term comptoir, with simplicity, 1 have adopted the rather abbreviated utle under its monetary emphasis, that spawned the frequent mistranslation which it is exhibited in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau: Un of the title as The Cotton Exchange at New Orleans. See, for Bureau de coton @ la Nouvelle-Orléans (A Cotton Office in New example, Charles S. Moffett et al., The New Painting: ImpressionOrleans). See Philippe Comte, Ville de Pau, Musée des Beaux-Arts, ism, 1874-1886 (San Francisco, 1986), p. 170, no. 22. For reasons Catalogue raisonnée des peintures (Pau, 1978). Degas first men- that will be made clear in Chapter [, the latter title is a misnomer.

tioned it in a letter to James Tissot from New Orleans on 18 2. Eugene Victor Thaw, “The Independent Scholar: Studies in February 1873 as Intérieur d’un bureau d’acheteurs de coton a la Nlle Impressionism by John Rewald,” New Republic, 30 June 1986, 41.

Orléans, Cotton buyers office. See Maurice Guérin, ed., Degas Cf. George Schmudt, “The Year Degas Painted a Newspaper,” Letters, trans. Marguerite Kay (Oxford, 1947), no. 6, p. 29. It American Heritage 33 (October-November 1982), 26: “The was exhibited as Portraits dans un bureau (Nouvelle Orléars) in the greatest painting ever made by a European master on these second Impressionist exhibit in Paris in 1876. See Catalogue de la shores.” Cf. John Russell, “Is Impressionism Too Popular for Its 2¢ exposition de peinture . . . 11, rue Le Peletier (Paris, 1876), p. 7, Own Good?” New York Times, 2 February 1986, 25: “Degas’s

no. 36. It was exhibited as Intérieur d’un bureau de coton @ la ‘Portraits in an Office (New Orleans)’ is one of the great Nouvelle-Orléans (Etats Unis) in Pau in 1878. See Société des Amis statements about American life. (It also portrays what may well des Arts de Pau, Livret du Salon 1878 (Pau, 1878), p. 31, no. 87. be the most beautiful trash basket in all European painting.)”

After it was purchased by the museum in Pau the same year, its 3. See Hollis Clayson, “The Second Exhibition 1876: A Failed title was listed as Intérieur d’un comptoir de Coton ad la Nouvelle- Attempt,” in Moffett et al. (as cited in note 1), 145—§9; Carol Orléans (Etats Unis). See Société des Amis des Arts de Pau, Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Catalogue des ouvrages exposés dans les salons de Vexposition au Musée Edgar Degas (Chicago, 1991), 27-35. de la Ville (Pau, 1879), “Liste des ouvrages achetés 4 l’exposition

I

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Fic. 7. Illustration of the interior of the new New Orleans Cotton Exchange building, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Veu paper, March 24 [S53

site, the floor-length window (of a type better seen in Fig. 4) still contains the same number and configuration of panes, and the interior wall that parallels Carondelet Street, depicted separating the inner and main offices in Degas’s scene, still exhibits the casings, moldings, and pulleys that allowed the windows to operate. The scale of the dado (if it is the original) seems to have been manipulated by Degas (as indicated by comparison with Fig. 9) so as to enhance the flaneur ettect of the relaxed pose struck by Achille DeGas, who leans his elbows against the window sill on the left. When the 1975 photograph (Fig. 8) was taken, the dividing wall on the mght, which parallels the plane ot the

rear wall, still contained the framed black wall-safe, which appears like a rectangular “halo” (or indeed a fireplace) behind the head of the clerk working behind John Livaudais at the ledger table on the right edge of Degas’s canvas. The orthogonal system of the painting diminishes asymmetrically toward (if not exactly to) this vault, whose shape is echoed by the framed picture hung on the wall above it. The spatial and symbolic convergence and juxtaposition of such images of secure money

and framed art may seem to be an apt expression of the central concerns Degas expressed in his letters to Tissot. Yet the displacement of these important signs to the picture's very margin 1s, albeit typical of the artist, somehow unsettling 25

Degas and the Business of Art

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ier “ie 4: =, el 2 Fosi IE,aca ;Pdi 2 iA wD.% 2 —2\th. oe (3x BON = 5 Oy at eg ARON SERs ay o - y » “4 i? uj me : ae? ; A >. ae: — ew. * 4 ; = y

é SOR ad eee Do ae = a Toe ae f ee, m9;

4 Ab se + fi , ¥* g ver. " rs no ‘ * a> adh ay * * > = oe : . ¥ ~, Fig. 12. Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, 1876, oil on canvas, 61.2 X 96.8 cm

are represented in attitudes of greater dignity, the picture completely eschews the backbreaking work

of both male and female field hands so as to idealize the two unthreatening black women in the manner of Jules Breton’s prettified French peasants, as opposed to Millet’s and especially Courbet's more powerful rural proletariat. The painting seems gently to suggest that picking cotton, in no matter how ennobled a manner, was to be the eternal lot of the black, despite emancipation. It 1s worth noting that critics uniformly praised Homer’s conventional depictions of black people. His related painting Upland Cotton (1879-95, Weil Brothers Cotton, Inc. collection, Montgomery, Alabama) was larger and more japoniste in its decorative scheme. When it was exhibited 1n 1879, the New York Times reviewer observed (prophetically): “here 1s a picture a cotton millionaire or say the Cotton Exchange ought to buy as a graceful tribute to the plant which has made so many fortunes.”** The ancillary presence in the composition of female cotton-pickers was seen as a merely picturesque black accessory setting off the main subject of the white raw material. That this was the acceptable, mythic convention for representing the production of raw cotton to the capitalists who sold it is confirmed by the large mural of a Cotton Field View, now in fragmentary condition, commissioned in 1883 from

the Chicago painter Robert Hopkin for the ceiling of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange.‘s Although Degas shared with conventional representations the material focus on the commodSS New York Times, 20 March 1879, 6, as quoted by Calo 89. See Sherman (as cited 1n note 69 24° John A Mahe and (preceding note 22. Boime (preceding note) points out that Rosanne McCafttrey, Enc) opedia of New Orleans Artists, 1718Homer exhibited [ pland Cotton again 1n I89Q§ at the Cotton 19018 (New Orleans. 19087). 190. The now-ftragmented painting Is

States’ International Exhibition in Atlanta, an event promotng stored in the Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans. It was

the cotton industry reproduced in its original state in the museum’s I9§§ ¢ italogue

41

Degas and the Business of Art

ity itself and the virtual leisure of those who sold it, he avoided the entire process of cotton production and the black labor that went into it. The leisurely business constructed in A Cotton Office explicitly excludes references to physical work. In this respect, the picture offers an instructive contrast to an earlier avant-garde French painting it in other respects resembles: Courbet’s famous

Funeral at Ornans (1849-50, Musée d’Orsay). As Carol Armstrong has suggested, both canvases realistically represent bourgeois men clad in black suits, the ritual uniform of Baudelairean modernity; and both are about the issues of family, class, and provincialism.% Yet by avoiding the mixing of classes implied in the Funeral by the reference to physical labor in the presence of the gravedigger, Degas’s smallish picture eschews the threatening social polemic of Courbet’s large-scale one, so as to offer something of an anti-manifesto to Courbet’s manifesto. The only depicted “labor” admitted to Degas’s scene is the quiet recording of figures by the three men who have shed their jackets in the

right foreground and in the center background. Their white collars are as close as we come to cotonniers, or cotton workers, a term Degas curiously employed in occasional later references to the painting. The absent black labor is, however, implied by the very presence of the raw commodity, by the depicted whiteness of what Degas referred to as “the precious material.” Although given the feigned appearance of nonchalance, the careful labor of the artist himself, what he referred to as “a

better hand than many others,” is likewise contained in the picture, and most tangibly in the painterly representation of that same cotton. Tactile traces of the literal work of the artist’s hand thus supplant reference to more latent forms of manual labor in the very sign of the product of that labor. The ostensible effortlessness of the artist’s stroke meanwhile denies the notion of mere “work.” (This aestheticizing displacement is magnified in the “better art” of the sketch version, in the close visual analogy between the painted cotton and the painting on the wall.) For reasons to be explored below, Degas’s lack of conventional moral invective about work,

not to mention his lack of traditional narrative, meant that he was miscalculating the potential appeal of his American scene for the likes of “Cottrell,” the Manchester textile magnate. Yet A Cotton Office can be linked directly with the bourgeois belief in the viability of conspicuous leisure,

that is, the appearance of abstention from productive work, as a sign of superior wealth and respected social standing.9 It is especially this aspect of the painting, its tidy facture notwithstanding, that connects it conceptually with Impressionism, which usually avoided the Realist representation of lower-class work for scenes of bourgeois and petty bourgeois leisure. Yet leisure in Degas’s sense, as in his favorite passage from Rousseau or in the concept of the flaneur, did not connote mere indolence or quiescence, but rather, creative, productive thought under the guise of doing nothing. In the case of A Cotton Office and its curious formal tensions, conspicuous leisure can also be read as containing underlying and contradictory messages about speculation, which according

to the socidlist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was by its nature “essentially aleatory .. . no more than the art, albeit risky, of getting rich without work.” Even though Degas was most assuredly

p. 12. For other even more conventionally “picturesque” genre An Economic Study of Institutions [1899] (New York, 1965),

paintings of black cotton-pickers, see The Virginia Museum, 35-67. Painting in the South: 1564-1980 (Richmond, Va., 1983), 83; Bruce 92. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Manuel du spéculateur a la Bourse, W. Chambers, Art and Artists of the South: The Robert P. Coggins 2d ed. (Paris, 1855), 4, 11. See also Claudio Jannet, Le Capital, la

Collection (Columbia, S.C., 1984), nos. 34 and 35. spéculation et le finance au XIX siécle (Paris, 1892), 231-83, 90. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and especially 233, on the more standard notion among nineteenth-

Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago, 1991), 30. century capitalists that, ‘despite its risks, speculation was a 91. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class:. legitimate instrument of progress.

42

The Cotton Office in New Orleans no Proudhonist, this kind of “effortless” speculation seems to hover abstractly and somehow uncertainly in the deceivingly limpid atmosphere of the New Orleans painting, in the impersonal interstices between languid individuals. As we have seen, changes in the capitalist system of speculating had in all likelihood contributed to the demise of Musson’s cotton business; yet it was in an entrepreneurial mood of speculation about a future market for his art that Degas undertook to paint his picture.

VI

Clearly, there were quite opposing opinions of business in Degas’s day. The conventional capitalist view, espousing the principles of Adam Smith and of the Manchester school of economics, believed in the free spread of markets and of specialized production as a means of effecting the progressive advancement of knowledge and standards of living. Dissident views that were espoused in markedly different ways by Marx, Proudhon, Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Ruskin in Europe and by Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau in America basically agreed that the market could be an invading, intrusive

force, capable of pulling families into its power and of placing them in situations beyond their control. Specifically in France, the old bourgeoisie which saw its family enterprises being irrevocably altered by the incursions of monopoly capitalism could even upon occasion adopt dissident, antiexpansionist, seemingly anti-capitalist attitudes.°3 Degas was a direct heir to the increasingly insecure grande bourgeoisie financiére. Judging from the checkered experiences of his family and from the painted example of A Cotton Office in New Orleans, the artist seems, consciously or unconsciously, to have held something of both the conventional and dissident views simultaneously. As the picture was carefully constructed in New Orleans, Degas’s ambivalence was already present in its explicit and implicit messages about business. With the aestheticizing displacement of the social polarities of leisure and labor, Degas seems visually to have confirmed, as he did verbally in his letters from New Orleans, the accepted social and economic beliefs of his family and class, beliefs he evidently assumed would be shared by his projected patron in Manchester. Yet he simultaneously threw such notions into doubt by incorporating them rather disjunctively into a destabilizing representation of his uncle’s fragmenting cotton firm. In the allusive tension in the painting between contradictory meanings, there seems to emerge a self-reflexive, 1f unconscious, critical assessment of business and progress from within capitalism’s increasingly differentiated ranks. Whatever lessons about speculation the artist may have learned in painting the picture perhaps served to prepare him for complications he would soon encounter in pursuing an audience and a market for his art.

vil At first glance, Manchester would have seemed in many respects a logical market for the Cotton Office. Known as “cottonopolis,” Manchester was considered to be the most important manufacturing city in England and the capital of the cotton industry, which had been the chief catalyst of the 93. Landes, “French Entrepreneurship” (as cited in note 73), family (whose fortunes were, however, considerably different $6-§7. Michael Miller argues that the French family firm could from those of the DeGas family). See his The Ben Marché: be more flexible in the face of dynamic business change than Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869—1920 (Princeton,

Landes would have it. He cites the example of the Boucicaut N.J.. 1981), 11-14, 127-29.

43

Degas and the Business of Art

Industrial Revolution. Since the mechanical inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Cartwright, Crompton, Whitney, and others during the late eighteenth century, cotton manufacturing had created a new class of wealthy bourgeois industrialists in Manchester. As art patrons, these cotton “lords,” as they were called, formed Agnew’s clientele and applied their entrepreneurial and specula-

tive instincts as much to art collecting as to cotton commerce. Yet the entrepreneurial messages about business Degas had hoped in New Orleans to convey to his projected audience in Manchester would have accumulated quite different and unforeseen ramifications in crossing the Atlantic. Although French observers of nineteenth-century Manchester often remarked that the city presented the very epitome of the idea of modern entrepreneurial progress, they saw the “enslavement” of textile workers in Lancashire factories as linked with the servitude of black cotton-pickers

in the American South. By far the darkest portrait of Manchester was not by a Frenchman. Although Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), wrongly identified Manchester as a center of impending proletarian revolution, he presented an indelible picture of

the stark contrast between the depersonalized labors of the cotton workers and the oblivious comfort of the upper classes living in suburban villas in Pendleton and Higher Broughton. Higher Broughton was home to William Cottrill, to whom Degas planned to sell A Cotton Office. The artist was possibly familiar with Cottrill’s art collection from a series of illustrated articles that appeared in the Art Journal during 1870—72.9° As we have seen, Degas had written to Tissot from New Orleans that a rich spinner like “Cottrell” would suit him fine “and would suit Agnew even better.” Back in Paris after his return from New Orleans, Degas wrote to Tissot to suggest making a business trip to London. He followed up on the Agnew connection for his New Orleans picture and attempted to generate some competition for his work between Agnew and Durand-Ruel:

. . . write to me and tell me something about my future with Agnew. Here Durand-Ruel assures me of his devotion and swears he wants everything I do. But Agnew really intrigues me. I have already spoken about him to a few people and what they have told me is absolutely splendid. They urge me to fall into his redoubtable hands. Did you tell him the picture I described to you from over there was coming? In a word, feed me some juicy ideas and some veritable sums of money, for me. I feel absolutely capable of doing my best and of earning an honest easy living.97 94. Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XLX° siécle l’Irlande (Paris, 1865), 287-92.

(Paris, 1865-76), v, 275. Michel Musson’s brother Eugéne 95. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in likewise noted a link, but for the opposite reason, in a pro- England (1845), trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner slavery tract, in which he argued that the end of black slavery in (Oxford, 1958), 28, 50-87, 313. The portions on Manchester the American South would mean the end of cotton production were translated into French in 1845 in Revue des Deux Mondes.

and would throw white cotton operatives in Europe into 96. My thanks to Julian Treuherz, Keeper of Fine Art, City unemployment. See Eugéne Musson, Letter to Napoleon III on Art Gallery, Manchester for this reference: “Visits to Private Slavery in the Southern States, by a Creole of Louisiana (London, Galleries. The Collection of W. Cottrill, Esq., Singleton House, 1862), 114. He urged France to give the South arms in exchange Higher Broughton, Manchester,” Art Journal, n.s. 1x (1870), 68— for cotton. For other French observations on contrasts between 70; “Selected Pictures. From the Pictures in the Collection of W.

Manchester’s prosperity and squalid working conditions, see Cottrill, Esq., Higher Broughton,” Art Journal x (1871), 36, 72, Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, trans. G. 80; XI (1872), 68, 92. Lawrence and K. P. Mayer (London, 1958), 104-10, 2 July 1835: 97. Marcel Guérin, ed., Degas Letters, trans. Marguerite Kay

“From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.” See also Alphonse (Oxford, 1947), no. 7, p. 33, Saturday, 1873; Bibliothéque Esquiros, Itinéraire descriptif et historique de la Grande-Bretagne et de Nationale, Ms NAF13005, no. 10: “écrivez moi et dites moi

44

The Cotton Office in New Orleans

In order to pursue his elusive goal of une honnéte aisance, Degas continued in 1873 to plan a trip to London, telling Tissot that Durand-Ruel was selling scarcely any of his work.9* But back from a short stay in London, he worried to Tissot that his position there was “in no way assured.” Citing eye trouble, he said some works intended for the opera singer Faure, which he had hoped to exhibit “for glory” with Deschamps (Durand-Ruel’s London associate), were not ready. He made no more mention of “Cottrell” or Agnew.% Given the subject and style of the paintings Agnew typically sold, Degas’s idea of connecting with the British dealer was seemingly fueled more by ambition and abstract logic than by pragmatic market sense and connoisseurship. ‘°° The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 had publicly connected the name of Thomas Agnew with the notions of fine art collecting, big British money, the cotton industry, and speculative free trade.!°! Yet the modern paintings typically sold by Agnew were nothing like Degas’s. By the 1860s and 1870s, after Thomas Agnew retired, his sons William and Thomas, Jr. developed a growing market in London for British artists like the Faeds, Holman

quelque chose touchant mon avenir auprés d’Agnew. Durand- into a picture dealer selling primarily contemporary English Ruel ici m’assure de son dévouement et me jure qu’il veut tout ce pictures as hot commodities to the growing market of nouveau

que je fais. Mais Agnew m/intrigue vivement. J’en ai parlé riche industrial capitalists in Manchester. He began to sell machinalement 4 quelques uns et ce que l’on m’en a dit est de la Constable, Turner, Martin, Frith, Egg, Leslie, Landseer, and plus important beauté. On me prie de tomber dans ses mains Linnell. In 1851, when he served as mayor of Manchester’s sister redoutable. Lui avez vous annoncé I’arrivée du tableau que je city Salford, Agnew contributed a gift of 120 paintings and 400 vous décrivais de la-bas? Enfin entretenez-moi d’idées riches et de engravings to the newly founded Salford Museum and Art véritables sommes d’argent, 4 moi. Je me sens tout 4 fait en état de Gallery. See Geoffrey Agnew, Agnew’s 1817-1967 (London, faire du meilleur et d’en tirer une honnéte aisance.” Transcribed in 1967), 1-9. See also William E. A. Axon, Annals of Manchester: A

French in Musée d’Orsay (as cited in note 5), 363, with the Chronological Record from the Earliest Times to the End of 1885 suggestion of a date at the end of March or early April, 1873. (Manchester, 1886), 327; Thomas Swindells, Manchester Streets 98. Letters, no. 8, 34-35, 1873?; BN, ms NAF 13005, no. 12: and Manchester Men, 1 (Manchester, 1907), 46-47; Elizabeth “Je veux apporter plusieurs tableaux 4 Londres. ... Durand- Conran, “Art Collections,” in John H. G. Archer, ed., Art and Ruel me prend tout ce que je fais, mais me vend guére, au moins Architecture in Wictorian Manchester (Manchester, 1985), 71-72.

parmi nous.” A related letter to Tissot (BN, Ms NAF1300s, no. 101. In 1857, Agnew was deeply involved in collecting works 16) informs him that Degas is coming to London for two or three by the old masters and by the older generation of living British days and expresses hope they might see some pictures together. artists for the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, which had

See Musée d’Orsay (as cited in note s), 364, 366. A letter to been planned to focus European attention on the cultural Michel Musson from Eugéne Musson in Paris, 6 July 1873, respectability of British art collections while fostering an mentions that Edgar Degas is leaving for London (D-M, box un, expanded market for Manchester’s commerce. The organizing

folder $5). force behind the exhibition was cotton manufacturer J. C. 99. Letters, no. 14, 41-42; BN, ms NAF1I300s, no. 17: “Ma Deane. See Gary S. Messinger, Manchester in the Victorian Age: pointe a Londres n’est guéres stire. . . . Je comptais en allant a The Half-Known City (Manchester, 1985), 122-26. Like Ruskin,

Londres lui [Faure] apporter finies quelques choses 4 lui, que who delivered a lecture at the Manchester exhibition on “The j'aurais montrées chez Deschamps pour la gloire(!)” See Musée Political Economy of Art,” the exiled French Republican critic d’ Orsay (as cited in note 5), 366. Grand Palais (as cited in note 2), Théophile Thoré took the Art Treasures show as an opportunity 222, suggests a date of 1874 for the letter due to its mention of to comment on what he saw as the exploitation of the arts for the

Faure. It should be noted that Agnew’s today has no records promotion of the cotton industry and laissez-faire trade principertaining to either Degas’s Cotton Office or William Cottrill, ples, all in the guise of elevating workers’ taste. According to their records from Manchester not having survived the move to Thoré, the exhibition itself was “une spéculation tout anglaise, London (communication from Christopher Kingsett in 1987). une affaire,” and he compared the efficiency of its design to the 100. Agnew’s had been founded in Manchester in 1817; the industrial principle of the division of labor. See Théophile Thoré, London branch had opened in 1860. With his partner Vittore Trésors @art exposés @ Manchester en 1857 (Paris, 1857), 2-11: Zanetti, Thomas Agnew had started out in Manchester dealing in quotation from p. 4. Ulrich Finke, “The Art Treasures Exhibicuriosities, bibelots, mirrors, prints, and meteorological instru- tion,” in Archer (as cited in note 100), 118-20, points out that ments. Gradually he picked up a trade in “old masters,” many of Thoré’s “discovery” of the painterly work of Hals at the them spurious. Agnew’s considerable business instincts led him Manchester exhibition was to have an important effect on the to develop from an antiquarian dealing in luxury commodities subsequent development of the French avant-garde.

45

Degas and the Business of Art

Hunt, Millais, Watts, Fildes, and Walker. During the 1870s, William Agnew in particular also began

buying from Durand-Ruel, but he stuck to the safer generation of older living French artists, including Troyon, Daubigny, and Dupré of the Barbizon school, along with the more academic Delaroche. The only French artist of Degas’s generation he was seriously interested in was the slickly anglicized Tissot. Works by more progressive artists like Manet and Whistler did not appear in Agnew’s stock books until the early twentieth century. ' Although Degas exhibited and occasion-

ally sold his ballet and racetrack scenes with Durand-Ruel in London beginning in 1872,!°3 he complained in his letters to Tissot from New Orleans that Durand-Ruel was not selling enough of the “franco-realist stock.” Indeed, the turning point for the reception of French Impressionism in England did not come until later with Durand-Ruel’s London exhibition of 1883, by which point critics generally preferred the work of Degas over that of his colleagues for what they saw as realism and evident draftsmanship, qualities they felt were not purely Impressionist. 1%

Vill

In 1873, it was not without reason that Degas finished the Pau version of A Cotton Office in New Orleans in a more meticulous, Tissot-like manner than the Fogg version.!°5 As we have seen, he had

sensibly implied to Tissot from New Orleans that Agnew was more likely to prefer the more finished “English” version than the more bold and spontaneous “French” style of the “sketch.” His letters from New Orleans make it clear that Degas saw Tissot as the epitome of French success in England and that he, Degas, would gladly emulate Tissot’s arriviste example. Back in Paris, he wrote Tissot that while in New Orleans he had seen an engraving in an illustrated newspaper of one of Tissot’s London pictures.!° Tissot’s Dutch-inspired group portrait of a French men’s club, Le Cercle de la rue Royale (Fig. 13) may even have been one of the inspirations for Degas’s A Cotton 102. Agnew (as cited in note 100), 10-28, 42. For his success in selling works through Durand-Ruel to Henry 103. Degas’s interest in English art and perhaps, by extension, Hill of Brighton, see Ronald Pickvance, “Henry Hill: An the English market, had begun earlier with racetrack scenes like Untypical Victorian Collector,” Apollo txxvi (December 1962), Jockeys at Epsom of 1860-62 (L. 75) and Gentleman’s Race before the 789-91. I am indebted to a seminar paper by Thomas Bayer on Start, begun in 1862 (L. 101). His Interior, 1868—69 (L. 348) may Degas and the English art market in the mid-1870s. For a more

have responded in part to Millais’s Eve of Saint Agnes, 1863 general discussion, see Denys Sutton, “Degas et l’Angleterre,” in (London, collection of the Queen Mother). See Theodore Reff, Musée d’Orsay (as cited in note §), 277-88. Degas: The Artist’s Mind (New York, 1976), 229-30. At one point 104. Kate Flint, Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception

in the late 1860s or early 1870s, Degas mentioned in an undated (London and Boston, 1984), 4-6, 51, 276-78; for a more letter his having met one “Gambar” on a trip to London. negative view of the British reception of Impressionism, see also Whether or not this was the influential dealer Ernest Gambart 1s Douglas Cooper, “The French Impressionists and their Relations

impossible to establish, but Gambart’s nephew Charles W. with England,” “The Impressionists and the English Critics,” Deschamps (discussed below) was by 1872 the secretary of and “Modern French Painting and English Collectors,” in The Durand-Ruel’s London gallery, where Degas was exhibiting. In Courtauld Collection: A Catalogue and Introduction (London, 1954),

his own dealings, however, Gambart distanced himself from 18-28, 37-45, 60-76. Impressionism. Theodore Reff, “Some Unpublished Letters of 105. Denis Rouart, Degas a la recherche de sa technique (Paris, Degas,” Art Bulletin 1 (March 1968), 88 tentatively places the 1945), 42 commented on the rather retrograde quality of the Pau undated letter in October 1871; Michael Wentworth, James Tissot version, saying that in spite of compositional innovations, it had (Oxford, 1984), 84 n. I suggests August 1868. In 1873-74, more in common with earlier works in terms of execution. inspired by Tissot’s financial success with engravings, Degas 106. Letter cited in note 97. The mentioned wood engraving,

unsuccessfully submitted a drawing of a ballet scene to the La Tamise, was published in the supplement of the Graphic, 8 Illustrated London News. See Grand Palais (as cited in note 2), 225. February 1873.

40

i ) reJ !iAth:+ if ie i) ; Ale a .|:e) Hi es abt ; : ee ee ee i] Hl ¥ Hes ita oF 0 a ag -— ies jie The Cotton Office in New Orleans

|=; ae : pe i Mh . oo te . ie ‘: Me 3 é < i-£ , a q a + TE it | 1 /Rie ab. £ pete eae4 4 eh Fae. i323 ; hig i =& Ng ' ie 4: Song pr ; a fc re 7has - liei iy j oe ’ , 4oie ae ,en ailBT &we, a Sa| mF .i Vas, 38 f more mt ee 4 ji. -: eo oan _Fi;| ;4tfe pth . sf ae Se 1] ; Te ft i ea:

— Ps i : 7 | J a AG # “ i or ae : ——_ ; : . Ww é be * =A oo ollLy ‘=sA : : wa ; rd , & .

~~ 4 si $ |S 2" 3 = . ; ’ St Bei. oh = ’ “ % J 7 A i ow i qa = A aes , \ r 4 Bae 3 ae. é 4 t | ae 4 2 : mE. e : ¢ 2d we ~ os Lae be = -4éGage —, o = — “= $ a # wh 3 ics at > mem, re —— = a saat ’

| :me) _ -y ie ee 95 | as. eae g a Se peg Rae a : me

Fig. 13. James Tissot, Le Cercle de la rue Royale, 1868, oil om canvas, 21§.9 X 330.2 cm

Office. Tissot’s painting had been exhibited to great success at the British Royal Academy in 1868, and, its large scale and centralized perspective notwithstanding, could have served as an example to Degas of the near-photographic representation of psychologically detached, black-suited men-atleisure. The fact that contemporary critics found the look of Tissot’s foppish club portrait to be, like his other work, more typically anglicized than French could also have endeared its example to Degas as he consciously sought an English buyer for the New Orleans picture.'°? When Degas had painted his portrait of Tissot in 1867—68 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), he had made obvious references to the linear clarity of Tissot’s painting style by closely juxtaposing the artist’s dandified head and a framed copy of a portrait attributed to Cranach in the Louvre. The painterly works on the easels surrounding Tissot had meanwhile offered a stylistic alternative more akin to Degas’s own growing Interests In spontaneity and immediacy. '°* This point and counterpoint of finish and sketch, of literal detail and abstract suggestion, of Englishness and Frenchness,'!°° were still crucial to Degas’s plans for marketing A Cotton Office

fissot certainly provided Degas with a businesslike example of how to tailor the artistic 107. See Wentworth (as cited in note 103), 60-61; Philippe 10g. Cf. a shghtly later commentary on perceived differences

Burty, “Exposition de la Royal Academy,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts between the soulless “prose” of English art and the vacue XXV (1868), 62—63: Jules Claretie M. lames Tissot Peintres ¢ poetry of French art: |anonymous], “French Art: A Compara-

culpteurs contemporains (Paris, 1872), 3732-76 tive Sketch The St itor, 18 August 1877. 1026—28 1o8. See Rett. Degas (as cited In note 103 [OI—]

47

Degas and the Business of Art

product to suit the available market.'!° According to Michael Wentworth, Tissot’s fashionable and lucrative success in England, of which we hear such admiring echoes in Degas’s letters, rode the crest of the nouveau-riche buying public’s hunger for status and for speculative investment. Tissot provided the new industrialist art consumers with easily legible, slickly idealized images of their own Class that reassured them of their social standing and power. Tissot’s experiences as an illustrator for Vanity Fair directly fed into the narrative content of his chic society portraits and genre scenes. Wentworth’s social analysis suggests that since the British class system turned class worry into moral worry, which was in turn addressed and dissipated by the explicit narrative content of paintings, Tissot was more successful with Victorian critics and collectors the more obviously he modified his art so as to exploit narrative implication and moral comment.!! No matter how much Degas may have been inspired by Tissot’s distinctive blending of contemporary portrait and genre and his technical and commercial example, he clearly eschewed Tissot’s anecdotal and theatrical qualities. The apparent moral detachment of the New Orleans picture, along with its avoidance of pointed social commentary and its potentially ambiguous and even lax messages about business, would not have appealed to English industrialist collectors. As recent manufacturing wealth displaced older economic and social structures, most of the new British patrons sought art that confirmed what they mythologized as the simple virtues and values of the immediate past, now lost. By focusing on the very uncertainties and tensions between old and new industrial and economic systems, Degas offered no such unmixed, undiluted, and uplifting social prescriptions and, in this respect, seems to have miscalculated his market.

[Xx

During the 1870s, when Degas hoped to sell A Cotton Office, there existed a curious duality in Manchester collectors between conservative artistic taste and an economic philosophy of capitalist risk. Exhibitions in Manchester tended to bifurcate into those celebrating industry and those de110. Tissot had evidently shifted away from historical topics he was soon able to stop doing illustrations. In the mid-1870s, to adopt modern genre painting in about 1863, having at that Agnew’s paid twelve hundred guineas for Tissot’s The Concert, time acquired a debt of more than 100,000 francs; two years later which subsequently went to the Manchester City Art Gallery. he was reputedly earning 70,000 francs a year and was bragging Within about ten years, he had earned an estimated 1,200,000 about proposals from wealthy collectors. See George Bastard, francs in England, with another million in reproduction rights in “James Tissot, notes intimes,” Revue de Bretagne, 2d ser., XXXVI France, not to mention several thousand dollars from exhibition (November 1906), 260. In 1871, Tissot moved to London, where proceeds in America. See Bastard, 265; Laver, 24-35; Michael he had already exhibited during the 1860s, reportedly to escape Wentworth, “James Tissot: ‘cet étre complexe’,” in Krystyna the repression of the Paris Commune, but in all likelihood out of Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot (New York, 1985), 17. Other market considerations. His involvement with the Commune is artists and writers responded to Tissot’s reputation for commerusually interpreted more in terms of the attempted protection of cial success with a combination of amazement and cynical his property, house, and possessions in the Bois de Boulogne than admiration. Berthe Morisot, for example, expressed astonishany adoption of political radicalism. Later in exile he would paint ment in 1875 at his English prices of 300,000 francs per picture. a portrait of the Empress Eugénie and her son. Sce James Laver, The previous year, Edmond de Goncourt dubbed Tissot “cet “Vulgar Society”: The Romantic Career of James Tissot 1836-1902 ingénieux exploiteur de la bétise anglaise.” John Singer Sargent is (London, 1936), 24-25; Wentworth (as cited in note 103), 81-82. said to have referred to him sarcastically (and perhaps enviously)

Changing his name from Jacques to James, he earned enough as “a dealer of genius.” Morisot’s letters and Goncourt’s journal money in London doing illustrations for Vanity Fair to set himself quoted by Wentworth (1984; as cited in note 103), 122-23; up by 1873 in an elaborate mansion in St. John’s Wood. His Sargent cited by idem (1985), 17. paintings and etchings began to bring in large sums of money and 111. Wentworth (as cited in note 103), 85-113.

48

The Cotton Office in New Orleans

voted to painting and sculpture. ' The twain seldom met. So although there was a commercial and industrial logic in Degas’s plan to sell a painting representing raw cotton to a cotton manufacturer, as a speculation in artistic “futures” that took the cotton market as its paradigm, the artist seemed to be basing his venture less on what Manchester industrialists actually collected than on what they practiced professionally and professed economically. He may well have reckoned that the subject matter of individualistic capitalism and speculative commerce in A Cotton Office in New Orleans would have an assured appeal in Manchester. Yet explicit connections between innovative pictorial values and the unrestrained entrepreneurial goals of new money—what the Impressionists’ defender Edmond Duranty in 1876 would refer to as laissez-faire, laissez-passer*!3—-were accomplished rather earlier in France than in Britain, despite Britain’s industrial edge and despite the propagation of the laissez-faire philosophy by the Manchester school of economics." And no matter how much Degas 112. See Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830-1860 in Charles S. Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism (Oxford, 1984), 297-98. On the separation of art and industry in 1874-1886 (San Francisco, 1986), 483, as discussed by Robert L. bourgeois aesthetics also see Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and Herbert, “Impressionism, Originality and Laissez-Faire,” Radical

the Bibelot (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984), 28. The typical History Review xxxvii (1987), 7-15, especially p. 11. bourgeois “lord” of the Lancashire “millocracy” presented what 114. The laissez-faire movement in Manchester, which both Howe (271-72) has characterized as an implausible mixture of Ruskin and Thoré had criticized, had found its roots in the ideas paternalism to workers, laissez-faire ideology, and pretensions to of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and others and had become a

“squirearchical” status. Within the sheltered retreat of his dominant force in Victorian politics. Although there was no suburban mansion, the new cotton industrialist decidedly pre- consistent doctrine that made the Manchester movement a school ferred nostalgic art depicting pre-industrial landscapes, rural in a strict economic sense, it undoubtedly stood for middle-class genre, scenes of sentimental domesticity, and religious, histori- notions of individualism, liberalism, and unrestricted market cal, and mythological topics that confirmed imagined notions of growth, all of which were seen as serving to expand the demand a simpler moral and social order. Yet by collecting the works of for Lancashire textiles. See Messinger (as cited in note 101), 65— contemporary artists, he could simultaneously put his speculative 88; Wiliam D. Grampp, The Manchester School of Economics instincts to work by risking investment in art he reckoned would (Stanford, Calif., 1960); E. Wallace, “The Political Ideas of the increase in value in the future. During the 1870s, artists like Manchester School,” University of Toronto Quarterly XxXIx (1960), Watts, Turner, Constable, Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, 122-38; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London,

Corot, Daubigny, Ary Scheffer, and Géréme were among the 1977), 129. Manchesterism, as the Germans came to call it, was favorites of rich Manchester “millocrats” like Ashton, Cooke, officially dubbed in 1848 by a contemptuous Disraeli, who and Miller. It was not until somewhat later that the wealthy condemned the repeal of the restrictive Corn Laws in 1846 as an

Manchester collectors Samuel Barlow and C. J. Galloway example of Britain’s being hoodwinked by the “school of purchased Impressionist paintings by the likes of Pissarro. By Manchester.” 1892, Galloway hung in his bedroom a pastel ballet scene Le systéme anglais, as 1t was known in France, considerably catalogued as being by “deGaz,” a work that he claimed to have influenced economic ideals there, especially among the old purchased directly from the artist. See Conran (as cited in note financial bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy, of whom Degas’s 100), 76. For the collecting habits of the new manufacturers, see father Auguste was exemplary. The commercial ideals of the Conran, 65-80; Agnew (as cited in note 100), 10; Cooper, Second Empire were likewise grounded in the Manchester model “Modern French Painting and English Collectors” (as cited in of market expansionism, which the Saint-Simonians embraced as note 104), 66; Messinger (as cited in note 101), 121-30; Jeremy they graduated from being utopian socialists to being captains of Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World (London, 1975), progressive industry. See Messinger (as cited in note 101), 81-83; 1s-21; C. PB Darcy, The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Adeline Daumard, “L’Etat libéral et le libéralisme économique,” Lancashire, 1760-1860 (Manchester, 1976), 122-55; Janet Wolff, in Pierre Léon et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France, m, “The Problem of Ideology in the Sociology of Art: A Case Study L'avénement de l’ére industrielle 1789—années 1880 (Paris, 1976), 137—

of Manchester in the Nineteenth Century,” Media, Culture and 60, especially 157-58; Patrick Le Nouéne, “ ‘Les Soldats de Society tv (1982), 63-75. For the ideological preference for and lindustrie’ de Francois Bonhommeé: L’idéologie d’un projet,” valuation of landscape, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Histoire et critique des arts, May 1987, 39-40. Degas was a direct Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cam- inheritor of the free trade ideals of la grande bourgeoisie financiére. bridge, 1980); and Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The (He certainly seems to have sought an unrestricted market for his English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, own art by playing Agnew and Durand-Ruel off one another.)

1986). The culmination of the French romance with J’école de

113. Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle peinture a propos du groupe Manchester was the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, better known as d’artistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel (1876), reprinted the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860, whose effects

49

Degas and the Business of Art

polished the style of his picture of New Orleans in order to accommodate British formal taste, his particular inclusion of both American and leisurely aspects in its content would hardly have endeared it in 1873 to British industrial patrons. British cotton manufacturers faced increasingly troubled times during the 1870s, in the wake of the lingering effects of the American cotton famine.''s In the context of these changing market conditions, Degas’s subject of apparently prosperous American vendors of the plentiful raw material would have had slim appeal for a Manchester manufacturer in straitened circumstances. The Lancashire cotton industry decelerated further during the period of declining business confidence initiated by the stock market crash of 1873.!!° The year 1873 also saw an immediate loss of momentum in British art collecting.1!7

lasted until the gradual return of protectionism in France in the £28,000,000 in wages. At the height of the crisis 247,230 workers

1880s. See Arthur Louis Dunham, The Anglo-French Treaty of were unemployed, 165,600 were placed on short time, and Commerce of 1860 and the Progress of the Industrial Revolution in £2,848,460 was spent by relief committees. Between 1861 and France (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1930); see also John Slagg, The Cotton 1864, Manchester bankruptcies totalled 1,193. See Axon (above, Trade of Lancashire and the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860, note 100), 274-301; William ©. Henderson, “The Cotton Being a Report of the English Evidence at the French Commercial Famine on the Continent, 1861-1865,” Economic History Review Enquiry of 1870 (London, 1870); John Slagg and Hugh Mason, Iv (1930), 195; idem, The Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861-1865 Report of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on Their Proceedings (New York, 1969). Douglas Anthony Farnie, The English Cotton Before the Commissioners at Paris on the Anglo-French Treaty of 1872 Industry and the World Market 1815-1896 (Oxford, 1979), 135-70,

(Manchester, 1872); cf. N.F.R. Crafts, “Industrial Revolution in has reasoned that although the Civil War was not entirely England and France: Some Thoughts on the Question “Why was responsible for the ensuing industrial depression in Manchester, England First2?’,” in Joel Mokyr, ed., The Economics of the the American-induced famine was the fundamental turning point Industrial Revolution (Totowa, N.J., 1985), 119-31, with W. W. in the history of Lancashire, and its after effects reverberated

Rostow’s response, 132-34. throughout the 1870s. By dethroning cotton from its central 11s. In 1870, before the stock market crash of 1873, the presi- position in the British economy, the American famine underdent of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce cited the Ameri- mined the predominance of the Manchester school in national can cotton famine and the increase in American cotton prices dur- affairs. Farnie qualifies this by saying that the cotton famine was

ing and after the Civil War as a major, if not the sole, cause of what in some respects used as an excuse by the cotton “lords” to he termed the “disasters” suffered by the overextended Manches- conceal the already glutted nature of the industry’s marketter cotton manufacturing industry. He listed nearly 145 firms as oriented system of production. having failed in 1869 alone and cited the reduction of mill property After the war, the British understandably turned away from to a fourth of its former price. Production, wages, and trade were the American cotton market toward colonial sources. There was down and expenses were up. He described many mill-owners as also an increased competition between cotton sellers (like being forced into emigration while cotton “operatives” were Musson) and buyers (like Cottrill), and it was the buyers who driven into destitution. See J. M. Bennett, The Condition of the had to assume the greater risk under the futures system. See Cotton Trade in Lancashire and the Operation of the Anglo-French Sydney J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A Study in Treaty of 1860 (Manchester, 1870), 3-39. See also Godfrey Armi- Economic Development (Manchester, 1904), 116-17, 126. tage, “The Lancashire Cotton Trade from the Great Inventions to 116. Farnie (as cited in preceding note), 171-208; Redford and the Great Disasters,” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Clapp (as cited in preceding note), 32-46; Thomas Ellison, The Literary & Philosophical Society xctl (1950-51), nO. 3, p. 31. Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London, 1886), 106-16.

During and immediately following the Civil War, trading rela- 117. Maas (as cited in note 112), 17. In Manchester in particutions between Britain and America had been strained by both the lar, the financial panic of the mid-1870s partially or totally ruined cotton famine and the international arbitration lasting until 1872 several respected cotton manufacturers who were art collectors. over the British-built Confederate ship Alabama. See Max Belloft, Henry McConnel and Sam Mendel were two such enterprising “Great Britain and the American Civil War,” History xxvu (1952), collectors who both suffered spectacular business crashes. Mendel 40-48; Arthur Redford and B. W. Clapp, Manchester Merchants and was forced to sel] all his possessions at Christie’s in 1875, and died

Foreign Trade, 1, 1850-1939 (Manchester, 1956), 12-20, 90-99. totally ruined. McConnel, a partner of McConnel and Kennedy, While the Manchester Cotton Supply Association worked to one of the most famous cotton mills in Manchester, managed to augment the cultivation of cotton in India, Egypt, the West recover and form a second collection. See Conran (as cited in note Indies, Australia, and elsewhere, losses during the cotton famine 100), 73. Henry Steinthal Gibbs, a prominent patron, described in reached enormous proportions. Between 1860 and 1868, Lanca- his Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer (1887) how shire suffered trade losses of £65,000,000 and workers lost some the disastrous downturn of trade in the 1870s forced him to sell his

50

The Cotton Office in New Orleans Even if the American aspects of A Cotton Office were somehow accommodated and the potential patron were financially solvent, it is still likely that this particular image of the leisure of commerce would have been considered problematic. The new industrialists generally shared staunchly middleclass origins and Protestant values. It was not coincidental that cotton masters preferred art that promoted illusions of uncomplicated happiness or messages of simplistic moral edification, as opposed to art that, like Degas’s, alluded ambiguously to larger social contradictions. 18 The scene of self-consciously relaxed commerce that Degas constructed in A Cotton Office completely lacked any kind of explicit moral narrative about leisure as the just reward of hard work. As we have seen, Degas’s messages about labor were more latent or covert. But a potential implication of his image was that the men selling the cotton had not lifted a finger to produce it, a message that might hit too close to home in Manchester. “Millocrat” collectors, moreover, holding art and industry as separate entities, tended to eschew buying representations of the cotton business that

despoiled the environment in which they lived. This did not mean that paintings of the cotton industry did not exist. 119

By the 1870s, the acceptable visual representation of the British cotton industry promoted, as did Winslow Homer’s scenes of cotton pickers in America (Fig. 12), a reassuring image of clean and well-nourished female cotton workers. An example is Eyre Crowe’s The Dinner Hour, Wigan (Fig. 14), which was exhibited successfully at the Royal Academy in 1874, and was possibly intended for

the industrialist collector Thomas Taylor, who owned the Victoria Mills depicted in the background. In the guise of socially concerned documentary realism, Crowe’s picture actually constructed a rather benign and conventional view of factory labor conditions.17° When The Dinner

art collection, liquidate his cloth firm, and move to Australia. the utiliry of instructing and elevating the moral taste of the

Discussed by Darcy (as cited in note 112), 153-55. masses while it placated social discontent. 118. See Thoré (as cited in note 101), 3; Rhodes Boyson, The 119. The earliest ones, like Joseph Wright of Derby’s moonlit Ashworth Cotton Enterprise: The Rise and Fall of a Family Firm view of Arkwright’s Cotton Mill (1783, private collection) im-

1818-1880 (Oxford, 1970), 84-114, I41; J. H. Fox, “The parted an idealized, romantic vision of the factory as both a Victorian Entrepreneur in Lancashire,” in S. P. Bell, ed., picturesque and sublime addition to nature. See Francis D. Victorian Lancashire (Newton Abbot, 1974), 103-26; Howe (as Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, ed. Arthur Elton cited in note 112), 61, 66, 81, 178, 271-309; Michael Harrison, (New York, 1968), 38—39, $5, fig. 28. See also Lionel Burman,

“Art and Philanthropy: T. C. Horsfall and the Manchester “Introduction,” in Manchester City Art Galleries, Art and the InMuseum,” in Alan J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts, eds., City, Class, dustrial Revolution (Manchester, 1968), 2. Albert Boime, Art in an and Culture: Studies in Social Policy and Cultural Production in Age of Revolution 1750-1800 (Chicago, 1987), 251-52 (fig. 3.21),

Victorian Manchester (Manchester, 198s), 120-74. Manchester suggests that the blazing windows of the factory also attest to a cotton “lords” had some rather definite opinions when it came to nightshift of cotton spinning. This kind of image soon changed as leisure and labor and the representation thereof. The stereotype Romantic Luddites hke William Blake and John Martin turned of the “Manchester man” as hardworking, self-disciplined, self- the “satanic mills” into a negative, if still sablime, vision of hell

righteous, and morally puritanical was not without its elements itself. With the growth of Chartism as a political protest of truth; yet the social formation of the cotton masters was more movement among industrial workers in the 1830s—40s, popular frequently based on hereditary recruitment than the Victorian illustrations of cotton factories turned the buildings into immense myth of the “self-made” man would have it. Messinger (as cited and forbidding fortress prisons fitted for defense without and

in note 101), 176, cites the serial novel The Manchester Man by rigid discipline within. See Klingender, 126-29, and fig. 30, Mrs. G. Limnaeus Banks (Isabella Varley Banks), published in wood engraving of “Cotton Factories, Union Street, Manches1874 in Cassell’s Family Magazine. With paternalistic attitudes ter,” from George Pyne et al., Lancashire Illustrated (1831). toward cotton workers, the new industrialists saw the leisurely 120. Brother of art historian J. A. Crowe, the artist had studied stewardship of wealth as a reward for hard work and as a with Delaroche in Paris and, in 1861, had exhibited at the Royal legitimate religious imperative and responsibility. They rational- Academy The Sale of Slaves in Richmond, Virginia (Heinz collec-

ized art collecting as philanthropic cultural patronage, which, the tion, Washington, D.C.), another social topic based on studies private nature of most of their collections notwithstanding, had . made on a trip to America with the writer Wiliam Makepeace

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Degas and the Business of Art

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Hour was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Crowe was praised by the critic of the Art Journal tor the “amount of earnest work” evidently expended by the artist himself. This aesthetic labor was thus seen to displace a more literal representation of the work of the mill girls, who were instead depicted relaxing “lazily,” as the reviewer put it, during their dinner break. '?!

Crowe's painting implied what was more explicitly established by a contemporary popular illustration of Manchester cotton mills (Fig. 15): that release or leisure time was a reward workers had to earn. In the popular illustration, the upper two vignettes establish the processing and spinning of raw material into cloth as prerequisites for the collective dinner break awarded to stoic female workers (both adults and children) below.'?? Both the illustration and Crowe's painting feature women workers to the virtual exclusion of men. These images seemed to represent an Thackeray. See McElroy (as cited in note 87), 45. The Dinner Hour eratives” labored, of the efforts of worthy philanthropists “to neuremained in the collection of the artist after its exhibition and was tralise the ill effects of promiscuous companionship among girls later purchased in the early twentieth century by the Manx hester scarcely past childhood,” and of the refined leisure activities enCity Art Gallery. See Julian Treuherz et al., Hard Times: Social Real- joyed by male weavers who studied mathematics, botany, and natism in Victorian Art (London and New York, 1987), 104-5, no. 85 ural history, and by “Lancashire lassies” who sang in local choral so(21. “The Royal Academy,” Art Journal, n.s., Xi (1874), 227 cieties. See “Sketches at a Lancashire Cotton Mall,” The Graphic, 26

28. no. 676 October 1872, 387. Cf. Klingender (as cited in note 119), fig. 63, an (22. The text accompanying the illustration sought to reassure engraving of “Carding, Drawing and Roving Cotton,” from Ed-

the reader of the supposedly salubrious conditions in which the “op- ward Baines, History of Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), in §2

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lime,”26, from 1872 The Graphic, Octo— Spa : wae|| ber (Cn , ‘40 \ Lae i. ; A . a ai p exclusive femininity in the labor force less for unsentimental reasons of social exactitude than for purposes of visualizing workers who were sympathetic, sexualized, and unthreatening to the male middle-class viewer.'?} The controlling presence of a policeman or factory guard in the center left which well-dressed, impeccably groomed women cheerfully 1964), 306-11. The cheaper labor extracted from great numbers of Operate cotton spinning machines in a pristine factory interior women and children ettected a dramatic restructuring of working[t is true that there were generally twice as many women em- class families and society. See Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the ployed as weavers in Lancashire factories. With weaving, spin- Industrial Revolution: An Application to the British Cotton Industry ning, and the various other specialized tasks taken into considera- (Chicago, 1965), 4, 180-312; see also I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers

tion, women over the age of thirteen made up §3.9 percent of the in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (London, 1930) and M labor force in British cotton factories in 1874; men made up 32.1 Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, 1958 percent, and the remaining 14 percent was composed of male and 123. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representation of female children from ages nine to thirteen. Everyone worked Women in Victorian Britain (Oxtord, 1988). For an account of more twelve-hour days, with a halt-hour deducted for rest and meals troubled and later representations of textile workers, see Carol See Chapman (as cited in note 115), 96, 106, I10, 112, 1§9; E. P Zemel, “The ‘Spook’ in the Machine: Van Gogh's Pictures of the Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Weavers in Brabant,” Art Bulletin, xv (March 198s), 123-37 S3

Degas and the Business of Art

middle-ground of Crowe’s picture assures, like a garde champétre in a painting of female peasants by Jules Breton, that work will continue when the protected dinner break is over. 14

Thus, although the respective views of the cotton industry painted by both Crowe and Degas served to construct notions of leisure in relation to labor, they did so in remarkably different ways. Focusing on an acceptably unthreatening image of the female working class, Crowe provided a legible moral narrative about the indentured dependence of leisure upon work. Comparable in some respects to the French steelworkers at Le Creusot depicted at their labors by Francois Bonhommé in paintings commissioned by the Schneider family, Crowe’s temporarily resting cotton “operatives” are seen as personifications of residual capital as much as labor.'*5 Although Degas shared with Crowe a relatively tight style whose artistic “hand” absorbed or aesthetically transmuted a more literal representation of the subject matter of labor, he emptied out any pointed moral anecdote from his scene of black-suited bourgeois men. Like Crowe, Degas also evacuated notions of class opposition by concentrating exclusively on one social group having a productive (or nonproductive) connection with industry. But unlike Crowe, Degas minimized the place of the worker: his three white-collar clerks (one of whom was not a clerk at all, but a partner in the firm) are, along with the other businessmen in the scene, clearly placed among the ranks of capitalists, to the exclusion of the physical labor force of cotton production. Judging from the examples of both Crowe and Homer, Degas’s Cotton Office did not conform to narrative, class, and gender conventions typically employed in representing the production of cotton to the capitalists who manufactured and sold it. Its lack of narrative or moral messages, combined with its unwelcome American aspects and the rocky financial situation of the Manchester cotton business in 1873, created an unpropitious market for the picture, despite the artist’s entrepreneurial intentions for it.

x A bona fide cotton “lord,” William Cottrill had been born in Lancashire and was fifty-one years old

in 1873. Heading a household that in 1871 had included his wife, three grown sons, and two 124. Although the women and girls are themselves not by giving alms to a male beggar who is presumably worse off depicted at work in the Crowe (as they are in the upper vignettes than she. These anecdotal hints at social advancement and of the popular illustration), the painting offers a sign of labors working-class morality are, however, undercut and to a certain accomplished in the center left background, in the bundles of degree neutralized by the detail of the liquor bottle held up for

finished cloth being loaded from a factory window onto a display by a figure just behind the letter reader, and by the market-bound wagon. The factory women in fact wear the end- implied life-cycle extending from the infant on the extreme right product of their own labors, that is, the drab cotton clothing next to the lamppost, to the wrinkled crone on the left bending to that, as Engels pointed out, workers habitually wore in the cold, tend the lunch pails. These darker signs seem to confirm old dank Manchester climate because they could not afford the Malthusian notions that vice and misery would always be the lot warmer woolens worn by the cotton masters and their families. of the working classes and were, in fact, necessary conditions for The smoke funnelling from the stacks in Crowe’s picture gives the wealth of the propertied classes. Thomas Robert Malthus’s further evidence of unseen productivity inside the prisonlike Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, revised 1803) is discussed

factory buildings. by Klingender (as cited in note 119), 114-15.

There is the occasional hint at the potential “elevation” of the 125. See Le Nouéne (as cited in note 114), 43. For further lower classes: the woman seated in the left foreground is discussion of Bonhommé’s various scenes of French industry sufficiently literate to read a letter in her time off and offers (without Le Nouéne’s critical interpretation), see also Gabriel something of a working-class female counterpoint to René Weisberg, “Francois Bonhonimé and Early Realist Images of DeGas and his newspaper in A Cotton Office in New Orleans. In the Industrialization,” Arts Magazine, L (April 1980), 132-35; idem,

extreme left background of the Crowe one of the women factory The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830-1900 employees assumes a typical (if marginally placed) bourgeois role (Cleveland, Ohio, 1980), 71-80, 270.

54

The Cotton Office in New Orleans

ers.126 His firm, Cottrill and Company, Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers, was relatively new, having been founded in either 1846 or 1853 (sources vary).1?7 The city office and warehouse of the firm were located rather unpretentiously at 23 Bridgewater Place, High Street, Manchester; more famous was Cottrill and Company’s large mill, known as “The Britannia Mills,” which was located in Whit Lane, Pendleton, and which, by 1884, had 25,000 spindles and 620 looms. By 1888, it employed about seven hundred skilled “operatives” and was described as exemplary of what today would be called “state-of-the-art” cotton manufacturing. !78 As previously mentioned, Degas possibly knew about Cottrill from a series of illustrated articles about his collection published in the Art Journal in 1870-72. The initial article in the series concluded that Cottrill’s art collection was representative of the combination of artistic stewardship and financial investment found in Manchester patronage as a whole.'9 If he saw the articles, Degas may have been encouraged by the fact that Cottrill was investing at the time in contemporary Continental as well as British artists. But given Cottrill’s pronounced taste for the likes of John Faed, Landseer, Frith, Géré6me, and Horace Vernet, not to mention some now-forgotten Belgian and German artists, the chances he would have been keen on Degas’s work seem slim. If Degas

formulated the idea of selling to Cottrill without knowing what he collected, then the artist’s venture was even more risky, given the likelihood of a mismatch. Like other Manchester industrialists, Cottrill clearly had a preference for rural landscapes, sentimental domestic scenes, and morally edifying historical and religious pictures.'3° The pictures selected from his collection for engraving by the Art Journal consisted mainly of Bouguereau-like scenes 126. Manchester and Salford Census, 1871: Broughton, sec. cial status, well known, and widely respected.” 16, p. 34, 128 Singleton Road. He was evidently a civic-minded 129. Art Journal 1x (1870), 7o: “It is needless to say that it is person. In a biographical sketch of his oldest son John, William among the many Art-collections in Manchester to which that city Cottrill is listed as having been an alderman of the borough of is indebted for much of its honourable fame; the merchants and Salford: W. Burnett Tracy and W. T. Pike, Manchester and Salford manufacturers there have been the principle patrons of artists at the Turn of the Century: Contemporary Biographies (Brighton, during the last twenty years, and to their liberality the painters, 1899), 107. However, in The Official Manual for the City of foreign as well as British, mainly owe ‘the high and palmy state’ Manchester, the Borough of Salford, and the Municipal Boroughs of to which they have attained. Possibly pictures may often be Lancashire (Manchester, 1873), 66, the William Cottrill who is regarded merely as remunerative investments, and there may be listed as a councillor for the Salford Borough Council, 1872-73, some collectors who gather them in no other light; but there can Pendleton Seedly Ward, is more likely Cottrill’s middle son, be no question that the beneficial influence of Art has greatly aided William Jr. The councillor’s address is listed as Beech-house, in educating the minds and improving the habits—of the young, Bolton Road, Pendleton, which in the Manchester city directory more especially—ain that munificent capital of commerce.”

is given as the abode of William Cottrill, Jr. 130. Of the latter he owned, for example, Linnell’s The Flight 127. Tracy and Pike (as cited in preceding note) say 1853; 1846 into Egypt, Leighton’s Helen of Troy, and Turner's The Resene of

is the date given in Manchester of Today: Business Men and the Brides of Venice. Other pictures in the collection addressed Commercial Interests, Wealth and Growth, Historical, Statistical, bourgeois virtues even more explicitly, including Hillingford’s

Biographical (London, 1888), 100. The Marriage Contract, O’Neil’s The Marriage Morn, and a didactic 128. John Worrall, The Cotton Spinners and Manufacturer's triptych by George Elgar Hicks entitled Woman’s Mission, in the Directory for Lancashire (Manchester, 1884), 47; Manchester of Today Three Relations of Daughter, Wife, and Mother, which had been

(as cited in preceding note), 100: “the business operations of this exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863. On the stereotyped firm have always been on a very large and extended scale, and representation of women in Hicks’s triptych, which is known embrace a list of patrons which may be classed amongst the from preparatory studies in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New largest and best buying houses not only of the United Kingdom Zealand and the Tate Gallery, London, see Nead (as cited in note

but of the whole civilised world. ... The mills at Pendleton 123), 12-16, pls. 1-3. Depictions of pastoral landscape and consist of an extensive brick-built lofty structure, used solely for genre, of which Cottrill collected proportionately more than cotton spinning; this forms a very conspicuous object for a very other topics, included a Landscape with Sheep by Samuel Palmer, a

considerable distance around. . . . [T]he whole are fitted with a painting with the same title by Auguste Bonheur (a brother of vast complication of the best, most modern, and highly expensive Rosa), a Lake View and River Scene with Cows by Copley and efficient machinery, of great productive power. ... The Fielding, Hunt’s The Fisher Boy, an Italian Peasant Woman by gentlemen comprising the partnership are of the highest commer- Géréme, Bonington’s Carting Seaweed and French Village Scene, SS

Degas and the Business of Art

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of happy peasant children, usually female. The texts accompanying the reproductions of two Belgian works, Théodore Gérard’s A Triumphal Procession and Campotosto’s The Spring of Life, emphasized that the rustic children depicted in each were returning from “rambling” among the hedgerows or resting “from some light labour in the field.”"3! As in Crowe’s more industrial The Dinner Hour (Fig. 14), the work ethic was dutifully acknowledged, but child labor was not directly confronted, having been conveniently supplanted by pleasant country leisure. The same held true for Our Pets (Fig. 16)

by a French student of Drélling named Edmond Castan, whose painting drew conventionally sexualized analogies between an adolescent peasant girl caressing a dove and an as-yet-unbroken water jug. In John Faed’s Within a Mile of Edinbro’ Town (Fig. 17), the virginal cottage “lassie” meditatively held a flower as she paused in an idyllic country landscape en route to a city market. The writer in the Art Journal described Faed’s meticulous facture as “a work of thoughtful labour. ’’'3? Both

Landseer’s Deerstalker’s Return, and a River Scene with Peasants Bonheur’s Landscape with Sheep in Art Journal 1x (1870), 69: “It

supposedly by Salvator Rosa. was in some passages sketchy, but the freedom is not of that kind 131. Art Journal x (1871), 80; XI (1872), 92. which bids for admiration of executive sleight of hand: there 1s 132. Art Journal x1 (1872), 68. Cf. the notion of painterliness not a touch that we can dispense with.”

within limits as expounded in the description of Auguste 56

The Cotton Office in New Orleans

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Fig. Within 17. Engraving John Faed’sTown paint- =§@ = Se Se ing a Mileafter ofAS Edinbro’ Sos Se, te —_ =F = Se OS SS stylistically and substantively, then, Cottrill’s art collection promoted a mythic, nonurban, preindustrial world of deceivingly simple middle-class virtues and happily rewarded lower-class labors: a sunny world far removed from the capitalist ambiguities coolly depicted in Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans.

Although one could speculate as to whether Agnew’s might have even suggested that the New Orleans picture would not appeal to Cottrill, further investigation of Cottrill’s tastes and preferences in relation to Degas’s painting comes to a dead end. On 25-26 April 1873, having just sold his palatial home, Singleton House, in Higher Broughton, Cottrill sent his entire collection of 86 watercolors and 161 oils for sale at Christie’s in London.'33 According to a report in the Art Journal, Cottrill made upwards of £23,000 from the sale, the largest sums coming from Linnell’s Flight into Egypt (1,075 guineas)-and Dusty Road (976 guineas), followed by Turner’s Brides of Venice (950 guineas). The report stated, however, that although the sale had attracted much attention, “purchasers, generally, seemed unwilling to pay the high prices they have of late for [33 Christie. Manson. and Woods. Catalogue oO} thre Highly Singleton House, Higher Broughton, Manchester (London. 1873 Important Collection of Modern Pictures and Water-Colou Drawings [he sale was announced in The Manchester Guardian. 10 April

of William Cottrill, Esq., Who Has Disposed of His Residence, 1873, 11, “Sales by Auction.” $7

Degas and the Business of Art

their acquisitions, ”!34 an assessment that certainly fits the troubled financial climate of 1873. Circum-

stantial evidence strongly suggests that Cottrill, like other Manchester “millocrats” pressed for funds, sold his art collection to keep his business afloat. !35 It is evident, in any case, that the specific venture in artistic “futures” plotted by Degas from

New Orleans did not prove immediately successful. Like any business speculation, it involved unforeseen factors and circumstances. Degas did attempt to mold his product to fit his prospective British market. Yet to the degree that Cottrill’s tastes can be reconstructed, there appears to have been a disparity between the patron Degas had hoped to find and the cotton manufacturer in question. The artist did not foresee that the entrepreneurial messages he had ascribed in New Orleans to A Cotton Office could shift in meaning if read by a quite different audience in Manchester.

Degas meanwhile found more urgent reasons to seek other audiences and other buyers for his painting.

134. “Picture Sales,” Art Journal, n.s., xm (1873), 189-90. At Addison Road North, Notting Hill, London, leaving his sons in least one of Cottrill’s watercolors (by David Cox) was bought by charge of the Manchester cotton business. According to ManchesAgnew’s: see George Redford, Art Sales: A History of Sales of ter city and business directories, Singleton House was bought by

Pictures and Other Works of Art (London, 1888), u, 141; other Joshua Milne Cheetham, another cotton spinner. After 1873, individual sales from Cottrill’s collection are listed throughout William Cottrill, Sr., was given no residential listing, although

Redford, vol. 11. his name continued to appear with the commercial listing of his 135. Before his eventual liquidation, for example, cotton firm. Tracy and Pike (as cited in note 126) list the London

industrialist Henry Steinthal Gibbs periodically sold his art residence in addition to Singleton House. His name reappears in collection in order to continue both collecting and manufactur- the Manchester directory of 1884, residing at The Elms, 24 ing. See Darcy (as cited in note 112), 154-55. Cottrill could even Seedly Road, Pendleton. All three of his sons, John, William Jr., have followed the prestigious example of cotton magnate Henry and Henry are listed as cotton spinners with Cotterill & Co. It was Ashworth, who made enough money to withdraw from active conceivably his son John who donated the painting Meditation

management of his firm, so as to pursue comfortable living, (1870) by the Frenchman Léon B. Perrault to the Manchester shooting, travel, and speculative investments. See Boyson (as City Art Gallery in 1911. The donor is listed as J. Cottrill in cited in note 118), 86. It seems probable that it was after Cottrill’s Manchester City Art Gallery, Concise Catalogue of Foreign sale of his estate and art collection that he took up residence at 33 Paintings (Manchester, 1980), p. 81 (1911.29).

58

The Exhibition in Pari Y THE TIME DEGAS SHOWED A Cotton Office in New Orleans in the second Impressionist exhibition in Paris during the spring of 1876, he did so in circumstances of urgent financial need.

The family money troubles that had commenced with ill-fated investments in Confederate bonds and had worsened with René DeGas’s speculative ventures and the dissolution of the Musson cotton firm, culminated, but did not end, in the collapse and liquidation of Auguste DeGas’s bank in Paris. Degas’s father died in Naples in February 1874, leaving his bank in a weakened state; by 1876, it

failed. According to various accounts, Auguste DeGas had not prospered: he had gradually diminished the assets of 150,000 gold francs at his disposal in 1833, and had sold his holdings in the Italian branch of the bank to his brothers in Naples. The liquidation of his bank left numerous outstanding debts, including one very large claim of 40,000 francs he had borrowed from the Bank of Antwerp, evidently in 1866, to cover for René DeGas’s considerable loss in speculating cotton futures.!

| The specific circumstances of the bank failure and the lingering burden of debt were described to Michel Musson in New Orleans in letters from his brother Henri and from Achille DeGas in Paris. Achille mentioned the liquidation in a letter to Michel in September 1874; Michel responded on 6 November 1874, acknowledging nos tribulations and explaining, as Achille had requested, the specific division among family members of funds yielded by the sale of properties at Canal and Royal Streets. The implication was that Achille, who had taken over running the bank after his father’s death, was attempting to sort out the complicated family finances. On 10 December 1875, Henri Musson described the situation further and asked Michel to urge René “to make honorable arrangements with his family” so as to cover the “enormous debt” he still owed.3 1. See D-M, box 1, folder 23 (mentioned above in Chapter J) again: “It is rumoured, however, that he is a man of some private for René DeGas’s rather jumbled report of the loss. The various fortune, and a story is in circulation that he sacrificed the greater accounts of the failure of the DeGas bank refer in somewhat less part of his income to save his brother, who had lost everything specific fashion to the source of the outstanding debt from René’s by imprudent speculation in American securities.”

business ventures in New Orleans: see, for example, Roy 2, D-M, box n, folders 63 and 65. The division of property McMullen, Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (Boston, 1984), had been stipulated by Germain Musson’s will. The sale (in 1851) 242-43; John Rewald, “Degas and His Family in New Orleans” had yielded $111,§73.

(1946), Studies in Impressionism (London and New York, 1983), 3. D-M, box m, folder 1. See Marilyn R. Brown, “The 40. George Moore, “Degas,” in his Impressions and Opinions DeGas-Musson Papers at Tulane University,” Art Bulletin txxu

(New York, 1891), 310, made public mention of the debt, (March 1990), 126-27. something that caused the artist to refuse ever to receive him

$9

Degas and the Business of Art

By 31 August 1876, when Achille DeGas wrote to Michel Musson to acknowledge a recent visit from his brother René, the situation had worsened and the bank had completely failed. This was due in large part to the fact that René, no matter how optimistic he was about future business, was currently unable to pay the quarterly remittance on his outstanding debt, leaving Achille, Edgar, and their sister Marguerite in dire straits: As for us, you know the condition in which our father’s firm was placed at the time of his death; only on credit have I been able to support an enormous uncovered balance for two years, but that credit is at last exhausted, the firm’s business was nearly at a standstill and we have, so to speak, no more clients. It was at last necessary to call a halt. Fortunately we have been able to avoid a worse catastrophe and to make arrangements on an amicable basis with our creditors. But payments to come in depend in large part, not to say entirely, on the remittances which René will have to make to put an end to his debt to his father’s firm. This cannot be done immediately because he has commitments to Mrs. Leisy [wife of his business associate in New Orleans] and Mr. Puech [his agent], and is not entirely master of the situation. We are obliged, Edgar, Marguerite, and I, to live altogether on a bare subsistence, in order to honor the promises we have made. I am trying to find another business for myself, but you know how slow and difficult that is.4

The situation continued to deteriorate. When Henri Musson wrote to his brother on 17 January 1877, René DeGas had still not paid his debts because of new reversals in the market for cotton futures. Musson enumerated the magnitude of the sum involved and described the resulting litigation and financial sacrifices now entangling Edgar Degas, his siblings, and in-laws. He explained that due to the loss of a suit brought by the Bank of Antwerp, Achille and his guarantors Edgar Degas and Henri-Gabriel Févre (their brother-in-law, married to Marguerite) attempted to save the family’s reputation by assuming the monthly installment payments on René’s debt of 40,000 francs. Describing how they were facing the threatened sale of their furniture by the bank, he said: “In Paris I see Edgar denying himself everything, living just as cheaply as possible. ‘The seven Févre children are clothed in rags. They eat only what is necessary. Honor is involved.” Under the circumstances, Degas moved to cheaper accommodations and was obliged to scramble for money.

Although Achille DeGas placed some, and Henri Musson placed most, of the blame for the

: bank liquidation on René DeGas’s various fiascos in the cotton trade, much of the problem can likewise be traced to the financial panic following the stock market crash of 1873, and to the shift to new banking systems that rendered more old-fashioned banks obsolete. Small family-owned loan banks were increasingly put out of business by the French corporate credit banks, in much the same way American cotton factors were being edged out by cotton exchanges.® In France this phenome4. Translated by Rewald (as cited in note 1), 41. The original engagé.” See also Henri’s letter of 16 May 1877 (D-M, box m, letter does not exist among the DeGas-Musson papers at Tulane folder 7): “Févre et Edgar, traqués par la Banque d’Anvers, paient

University. avec la plus grande peine par des versements mensuels.” See 5. D-M, box m1, folder 7: “Je vois 4 Paris, Edgar se priver de Brown (as cited in note 3), 127.

tout, vivre du moins possible. Les 7 enfants de Févre vétus de 6. See above, Chapter I, note 73, on banks. trous. Ils prennent seulement leur nécessaire, L’honneur est

60

The Exhibition in Paris

non in banking was part of a larger generational and systemic shift incorporating family business into monopoly capitalism during the latter part of the nineteenth century.’

Keeping in mind these broader financial trends, one can nonetheless see how the DeGas family’s situation could only have been exacerbated by Achille DeGas’s scandalous escapade at the Paris stock exchange in 1875. The ostensibly detached flaneur depicted near the left margin of A Cotton Office in New Orleans was involved in a shooting incident on 19 August 1875, on the steps of the Bourse, in a melodramatic event that wounded the family pride and finances even further. The incident made the front page of the Paris-Journal on 21 August. It was likewise reported in detail in Le Figaro; and both newspapers subsequently provided follow-up articles. According to the reports,

Achille DeGas, being accosted and beaten with a cane by an engineer named Victor-Georges Legrand, had pulled a revolver and grazed his assailant. DeGas (spelled both “Degas” and “DeGas” in the newspapers) spent thirty-six hours in a police station. In court on 24 September, it came to light that Legrand was jealous of his wife, a former dancer, who had once been Achille DeGas’s mistress, and had borne him a child who had died. Achille had evidently begun to see the woman, Thérése Mallot, again and had given her some 2,000 francs. The court sentenced Achille to two months in jail and Legrand to one month, and each was assigned half the court expenses. ® Although Edgar Degas himself was not mentioned in the newspapers, two of the articles discussed in detail the family’s honorable reputation, its banking firm, its connections in America and Italy, and the “considerable fortune” that the death of Auguste DeGas had supposedly left Achille.9 The Paris-Journal in particular referred to Achille DeGas’s violent act as “Americanized” and blamed his habit of carrying a revolver on the time he had spent in the United States.!° Despite Edgar Degas’s apparent silence on the Bourse incident, it was known to his friends. Berthe Morisot wrote to her mother directly after hearing about it in London; and Eugéne Manet wrote to Berthe Morisot during

the autumn of the same year about visiting a very worried Achille DeGas just before the court

hearing. Daniel Halévy later recalled that Edgar Degas himself, in order to save the family honor, accepted entire responsibility and paid off the debts resulting from Achille’s case, in addition to those stemming from the bank liquidation. As Halévy saw it, the fact that Degas now found himself forced to eke out a living with his art and to cover for his impoverished brothers transformed him into the somber, farouche recluse he was to remain.’ Although it is unlikely that the Bourse scandal

was the single event that initiated Degas’s social withdrawal, the intersection of personal and economic complications at the time definitely increased the artist’s desire to sell his art in London. 3 7. See Jean Lhomme, La Grande bourgeoisie au pouvoir (1830- 9. Paris-Journal, 21 August 1875; echoed in part in Le Figaro,

138-40. 10. 21% August 1875.

1880): Essai sur Vhistoire sociale de la France (Paris, 1960), especially 21 August 1875.

8. “Le Drame de la Bourse,” Paris-Journal, 21 August 1875, I- tr. Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot,

2; “Gazette judicaire: Tribunal correctionnel de la Seine: L’Affaire trans. B. W. Hubbard (New York. 1957), 93. 97. Legrand-Degas,” Paris-Journal, 26 September 1875, 3; “Informa- 12. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle (Paris and Geneva, 1960), I11— tions,” Le Figaro, 20 August 1875, 3; Le Figaro, 21 August 1875, 13. It should be noted that Halévy mistakenly gives the date of

3; Fernand de Rodays, “Gazette des tribunaux: Police correc- the scandal as 1878. tionnelle: Affaire Legrand et Degas. —Les Coups de revolver de 13. See McMullen (as cited in note 1), 251. For Edgar Degas'’s la place de la Bourse,” Le Figaro, 26 September 1875, 3. The most later brief mention of the event (after Achille’s death) in a letter of

detailed recent account is in McMullen (as cited in note 1), 2s0- October 1893 (now in the Getty Center for the History of Art), §1. On 20 November 1875, the sentence was reduced to one see Grand Palais (as cited in note 8), 488. month in prison. See Grand Palais, Degas (Paris, 1988), 214.

61

Degas and the Business of Art

As Degas found himself even more pressed to find a market for A Cotton Office in New Orleans, his position could only have been made more uncomfortable by personal reminders in the painting, in the conjoined figures of Michel Musson, René DeGas, and Achille DeGas, of dissolved and collapsed family businesses, debilitating family debt, bankruptcy, and embarrassing public scandal. Given the fact that René DeGas’s continuing inability to pay back his debt had to do with new reversals in the cotton trade, it seems likely that any fondness Edgar Degas may have had for the subject matter of the New Orleans picture would have worn thin. In the midst of pecuniary strain and chronic eye trouble, Degas had continued to send works to London in 1874, into the care of Charles W. Deschamps, whom he had mentioned to Tissot in letters from New Orleans and from Paris upon his return.'4 Deschamps, who was a nephew of the British dealer Ernest Gambart,'5 served, it should be recalled, as the secretary of Durand-Ruel’s London branch, where Degas had first exhibited in 1872. Although Degas had complained to Tissot from New Orleans that Deschamps was not selling enough of his “franco-realist stock,” he began in November 1874 to correspond with Deschamps about sending further paintings to London. In the earliest extant dated letter, Degas discussed the shipment to London of an unnamed painting that he suggested should be sold for about 1,000 francs; he also urged his correspondent to send him funds as soon as possible." It was not until the spring of 1876 that Degas specifically mentioned A Cotton Office to Deschamps; and that was after the painting was exhibited with relative success in the second Impressionist show in Paris. Although a buyer did not step forward at the exhibition, critics were reasonably kind to the picture. This is especially notable in view of the mixed critical reception of the exhibition as a whole.

II

The broad aims of the show were quite businesslike. As a “joint-stock” company, the associated

artists came together to market their art in a commercial gallery independent of the state art bureaucracy. The location of the exhibition, which charged a one-franc admission fee, was the premises of Durand-Ruel at 11 rue le Peletier, in a fashionable shopping district frequented by the haut-bourgeois and nouveaux riches. Within this new free market venue, in which the by-nowpredictable range of aesthetic standards sanctioned by the Salon system was avoided, journalistic critical opinion could influence uncertain buyers’ perception of otherwise ambiguous artistic value. Although progressive aesthetics were theoretically transformed by the Impressionist exhibitions into investment commodities for those entrepreneurial clients willing to take a risk, this was only the second time the new system had been tested in practice. The results of the first exhibition in 1874 had been problematic, and the market for Impressionism was still insecure in 1876. 14. See above, Chapter I, notes II, 12, 99. 1875, Degas wrote to announce to Deschamps the forthcoming 15. See Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World arrival of another painting in London, probably La Répétition au

(London, 1975), and Pierre Miquel, Art et Argent 1800-1900 foyer de la danse (L. 362), which was shown in November 1875

(Maurs—la Jolie, 1987), 403. and bought by Captain Henry Hill. See Theodore Reff, “Some 16. Letter of 8 November 1874, Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris; Unpublished Letters of Degas,” Art Bulletin L (March 1968), 89; summarized by Denys Sutton, Edgar Degas: Life and Work (New Ronald Pickvance, “Degas’s Dancers: 1872-1876,” Burlington York, 1986), 115. Whether or not the mentioned painting was A Magazine cv (June 1963), 265. Degas’s later shipment of A Cotton Cotton Office is impossible to document, although it seems likely Office to London in 1876 is discussed in chapter Ill. that Degas would have set a higher price for it. On 22 August

62

The Exhibition in Paris

Within this context of speculation, the meanings evidently conveyed by Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans in some ways coincided with those the painting could have had in Manchester or

New Orleans in 1873; yet interpretations also diverged in relation to the new audience. Critical response in 1876 indicates that the strategy of stylistic finish, which the artist had formulated in New Orleans with a Manchester market in mind, ultimately served him well in Paris, but not without

complications. Style became conjoined by critical opinion to the more substantive issue of the representation of commerce in relation to labor. Giving privilege to leisurely business in A Cotton Office, which would have proved ideologically problematic in Manchester, was evidently more acceptable in the flaneur-like French cultural environment. Critical readings of the painting in Paris were nevertheless ideological in nature. Before analyzing critical responses in 1876, we should situate A Cotton Office in relation to the other exhibited works. The didactic, pre-industrial subject matter that, as we saw, typified the art collections of William Cottrill and other Manchester cotton magnates, and that was likewise common in the official French Salon, did not characterize the works shown in the Impressionist exhibition of 1876. Admittedly, the largest proportion of the exhibited works took suburban leisure and

suburban and rural landscape as their theme, most notably those by Monet (possibly Fig. 18), Pissarro, Renoir, Rouart, and Sisley.!7 But the presentation of these subjects was detached rather than moralizing, and there were hints and evidence of the existence of industry and progressive technology at the edges, in works like Béliard’s Fabriques au bord de l’Oise, Bureau’s Usine 4 Pacy-sur-

Eure, Monet’s Le Pont du Chemin de fer (Argenteuil), and Morisot’s Le Bateau a vapeur.*8 If one includes the topics of artisans and entertainers, it is significant that some twenty other works, out of the 252 exhibited, took labor as their subjects, the most frequently noticed being Caillebotte’s two versions of Raboteurs de parquets, depicting floor-scrapers at work in elegant new bourgeois apartments (see Fig. 19)."9 In Caillebotte’s case, working-class subject matter was mediated by a slickly finished style that Zola, for one, would label “bourgeois.” The exhibited paintings representing themes of workers included several by Degas himself of laundresses, dancers, and one modiste. Significantly, such proletarian topics in Degas’s oeuvre were, as Eunice Lipton has discussed, typically female.?° According to Carol Armstrong, critics in 1876 tended to transform Degas’s dancers in particu17. For example, Monet’s five views of Argenteuil and other Jean-Baptiste Muillet’s La Labourage, and Morisot’s Un Chantier scenes of Sainte-Adresse, le Petit Genevilliers, and la Grenouil- and Un Percher de blanchisseuse. lére; Pissarro's four scenes of Pontoise; Renoir’s Déjeuner chez 20. Catalogue, nos. 37, Examen de danse; 41, Blanchisseuses

Fournaise; Rouart’s views of Normandy and Brittany; and (perhaps Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena); 44, Salle de danse Sisley’s several scenes of Marly. See Catalogue de la 2¢ Exposition de (Moffett no. 25, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); 47-48, Coulisses (Art Peinture . . . 11, rue Le Peletier (Paris, 1876), nos. 149, I§1, 152, Institute of Chicago); Blanchisseuse (silhouette) (Moffett no. 26, 155, 1§6, 157, 160, 164, 200, 204, 206, 208, 221, 227, 229, 239, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); 56. Blanchisseuse 240, 244; reprinted (with current locations cited where possible) portant du linge; 51, Divers croguis de danseuses; 53, Orchestre; $4, in Charles S. Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism Blanchisseuse (dessin). For a social discussion of these themes in

1874-1886 (San Francisco, Calif., 1986), 160-65. Rather than the Degas in light of the working conditions of the depicted view of la Grenouillére here reproduced, Monet may have shown laundresses, dancers, and milliners, see Eunice Lipton, Looking instead the larger painting formerly in the Armhould collection in Into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley and

Berlin, presumably lost during World War II. Los Angeles, 1986), chapters 2-4. On the tendency to overlook 18. Catalogue (preceding note), nos. 2, 16, 1§2, 172. subjects of female labor in Impressionism, see Linda Nochlin, 19. Ibid., nos. 17 (Moffett no. 19, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and “Morisot’s Wer Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in 18 (Moffett no. 20, private collection, Paris). See also Catalogue, Impressionist Painting,” in her Women, Art, and Power and Other nos. 60, 64, 121, 146, 174, 175, including Levert’s Le Charpentier, Essays (New York, 1988), 37-56.

63

Degas and the Business of Art

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The Exhibition in Parts

Given the presence in the exhibition of the depictions of industry and labor-related subjects, | however limited in number or in their ideology, it seems that Stéphane Mallarmé’s optimism in 1876 about the coexistence of Impressionist art and French democracy, that is, the emergence during the Third Republic of what Gambetta opportunistically called les nouvelles couches sociales, was perhaps not so immediately unfounded as it may later have appeared.?3 The general analogy the

poet-critic drew in his essay “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” between the meaning of the | new painting and “the equally characteristic politics and industry” of the age would seem to have particular relevance for A Cotton Office, if only insofar as industry is concerned. Yet the novel focus

of Mallarmé’s discussion, which concluded with the parallel between art and politics, was primarily 7 a matter of innovative pictorial form. He argued that unrestrainedly pure, self-referential (indeed, modernist) painting had a social dimension in that it could freely serve the artistic needs of the democratic majority.25 What may seem contradictory in hindsight was somehow typical of 1876, when the critical literature as a whole presented tensions between discussions of form, subject matter, and ideology. The overall appearance of the exhibition seemed to undercut the group’s own noncontroversial, businesslike aims of winning public approval and selling art. The show featured enough works conceived as sketches and exhibited as paintings (see Figs. 18 and 20) to make a seemingly renegade lack of finish as much a critical shibboleth as it had been in 1874.76 Degas himself seems to have tried to cover all the bases as far as form and marketing were concerned. Along with the social range of his modern subjects, he elected to exhibit a broad spectrum of formal experiments that together refused to comply with any established stylistic codes. These ranged from works like the Cour d’une maison (Nouvelle-Orléans) (Copenhagen, Ordrupgaardsamlingen) or the portrait of Yves GobillardMorisot (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which were explicitly designated in the catalogue as esquisse and ébauche, to those works exhibited as “finished” paintings, like the roughly scumbled Blanchisseuse (Silhouette) (Fig. 20) or the astonishingly bold and seemingly incomplete , Petites paysannes se baignant a la mer vers le soir (private collection, Northern Ireland).?7 In the midst of these sat the relatively slick, tidy, and anglicized facture of A Cotton Office in New Orleans, conceivably as further evidence of the defiance of formal codes, even avant-garde ones, but more likely as yet another stylistic “hand” or option that could be selected for purchase from among the heterogeneous display of original, handmade products for sale. 23. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art and industry, must seem the meaning of the manner of painting

of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), 267-68. which we have discussed here.” 24. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard 25. See discussion of Mallarmé’s text by Hollis Clayson, “The Manet,” first published in the Art Monthly Review and Photo- Second Exhibition 1876: A Failed Attempt,” in Moffett et al. (as graphic Portfolio (London), 30 September 1876, is reprinted in cited in note 17), 149—S$0.

Moffett et al. (as cited in note 17), 28-34. Mallarmé made no 26. Ibid., 145. specific mention of A Cotton Office. The passages in question (33- 27. Catalogue (as cited in note 17), nos. 40, 42, 49, 36; see also 34) read: “The participation of a hitherto ignored people in the Moffett et al. (as cited in note 17), nas. 26, 27. Kathleen Adler political life of France is a social fact that will honor the close of finds the Petites paysannes “a work so tree and bold that it would the nineteenth century. A parallel is found in artistic matters, the surely have been unacceptable to any dealer at the time, let alone

way being prepared by an evolution which the public with rare the Salon”: “The Phantom of the Show,” Art History 1x, prescience dubbed, from its first appearance, Intransigeant, (September 1986), 378. It may not have been exhibited unul which in political language means radical democratic. . . . Such, 1877, when it was again listed in the catalogue. See Grand Palais,

to those who can see in this the representative art of a period Degas (Paris, 1988), no. 149. which cannot isolate itself from the equally characteristic politics

07

Degas and the Business of Art II]

Within the exhibition’s commercial venue, Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans was, along with Monet’s exotic, fairly finished, and eye-catchingly large Japonnerie (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), singled out for more critical comment, both positive and negative, than other exhibited works.?8 Of some thirty-nine reviews, fourteen specifically mentioned it and of these, only two were negative.

Fifteen were quite general, addressing neither the form nor the content of exhibited works very specifically, instead proclaiming ideological points of view about Impressionism and/or “Intransigence.” Here negative opinions slightly outweighed positive ones. Other notices that spoke generally of Degas’s work were approximately equally divided between admiration and censure. Those that specifically approved of the New Orleans picture frequently did so because its form seemed more distinctly drawn and traditionally finished than other works, including those by Degas. Its content was meanwhile seen as less objectionable than that of Degas’s scenes of working women. On the whole, then, Degas’s reviews were mixed in 1876, but the positive ones slightly outweighed the negative ones, largely because of the presence of A Cotton Office in New Orleans. An overview of

these articles indicates that support for the painting came largely, albeit not entirely, from the conservative press. Yet it also helped inspire the Realist critic Duranty to write an elaborate and important theoretical defense of Impressionism. Of the articles that approved or disapproved of Impressionism on ideological grounds without mentioning A Cotton Office, more than half were negative and came for the most part, though not exclusively, from the rightist press.29 Critics writing in newspapers like the monarchist Gazette de France and the center right Moniteur universel and in the expensive, specialized magazine L’Art connected the group with revolutionary politics and condemned its formal intransigence, the latter being linked in L’Art with a speculative exploitation of public gullibility.3° The group’s mercenary urge (gagner le franc) was likewise denounced by the pseudonymous writer Punch in the radical left 28. Clayson (as cited in note 25), 147. (She suggests, the center right, reviews in La France and Le Petit journal being accordingly, that it is unlikely that the painting exhibited as Dans examples of the former and an article in Le Petit Moniteur universel

un café [no. 52] was the notorious Absinthe, since it drew no the latter. See [Marius Vachon], “Carnet de la journée,” La critical response.) Clayson’s essay is the best guide to the critical France, 4 April 1876, 2; on this article also see Clayson (as cited in reaction to the 1876 exhibition, largely because of her sensible note 25), 152; “Le Salon de 1876,” Le Petit journal, 1 April 1876,

assessment of the political positions represented by various 2-3; “Courrier de Paris: L’Ecole des Batignolles,” Le Petit critics. Her careful analysis of twelve critics confirms that radical Moniteur universel, 1 April 1876, 3.

papers tended to praise the exhibition while conservative ones 30. Simon Boubée, “Beaux-arts: Exposition des imprestended to condemn it. Armstrong (as cited in note 21), 29-33, sionnistes, chez Durand-Ruel,” La Gazette de France, 5 April 73-77, gives a much more abbreviated mention of a few critics 1876, 2; “Revue des journaux: Revue littéraire et anecdotique, ” responding specifically to A Cotton Office. A general guide to the Le Moniteur universel, 11 April 1876, 466, Léon Mancino, varieties of critical response in 1876 is found in Jacques Lethéve, “Deuxiéme exposition de peintures, dessins, gravures faite par Impressionnistes et Symbolistes devant la presse (Paris, 1959), 74-82. un groupe diartistes,” L’Art v (1876), 36-37. See Clayson’s A good bibliography of the reviews is found in Moffett et al. (as discussion of this article (as cited in note 25), 152. See also Louis cited in note 17), 490-91. For political and other information on Leroy, “Chose et autres,” Le Journal amusant, 15 April 1876, 3, 6the critics and journals, I have consulted primarily Claude 7 (p. 6 on Degas); idem, “La Réception d’un impressionniste,” Le Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse frangaise, 1871-1940, I Charivari, 15 April 1876, 2-3. This conservative critic engaged in

(Paris, 1969). See also Clayson’s note 19. predictably snide satire, cheaply conserving his journalistic 29. Here I agree in sum with Clayson’s political assessment energy by repeating, virtually verbatim, on the same day, in two (see preceding note), although I perhaps see more shades of gray different journals, his description of Degas’s laundresses as in the details. Antagonistic or uncertain condemnation of the ironing a snow-covered rock in a forest of frozen stalactites. Impressionists’ defiance of official rules and formal systems could Explicit politics (and in this case issues of class) were displaced occur in journals of the republican center left as well as those of by, or translated into, formal derision.

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The Exhibition in Paris

journal L’Evénement,3" in an abrasive article, proving that critical venom was not the sole property of the rightist press. Despite the occasional political shades of gray, the staunchest support for the exhibition came from the republican newspapers (though even this support was not without qualification). Philippe Burty’s unsigned review in République francaise, the Opportunist voice of its editor Gambetta, was one of the strongest endorsements, singling out for special praise the group’s independent opposition to academic strictures and its ideal of a free exhibition.3}? Alfred de Lostalot, writing in the republican journal Bien public, recommended the group’s originality to amateurs and declared that the paintings by Lepic, Desboutin, and Millet would not scare away even the most timid conservative.33 The group’s commercial interests, which had been lambasted on the right, were thus turned

into a positive act of freedom from government tutelage. This was a free-market principle that (apart from issues of artistic taste) would have been appreciated in Manchester. It is notable that even the hoary Revue des Deux Mondes (at the time conservative republican) ran an article on the Salon by Victor Cherbuliez, who devoted a page and a half to a plea for moderate respect for the Impressionists, whom he called the “school of the future.” Addressing the issue of style, he pointed out that the previous year a painted sketch (pochade) by Fortuny had been sold at the Drouot for 40,000 francs.

He seemed to imply that youth and the growing market for sketches could well be on the side of those Impressionists with talent. 34

These reviews, both favorable and unfavorable, thus agreed that commercial issues were central to the interpretation of Impressionist style, even though the critics often stood on opposing ideological sides when they confronted the stylistic issues. Other related leitmotivs that surfaced and became conflated with issues of marketing and politics were the notions of individuality, independence, originality, innovation, and progress. These ideas could also be found in those reviews that more specifically addressed the work of Degas, particularly the New Orleans painting.

[V

Of four reviews that denounced Degas, two specifically mentioned A Cotton Office, taking its artist to task for the nature of its form.35 Writing in the conservative journal Revue politique et littéraire, 31. Punch [Gaston Vassy], “La Journée 4 Paris; L’Exposition Mondes xv (1876), 515-16. (The price of the Fortuny was

des impressionnistes,” L’Evénement, 2 April 1876, 2. ironically the same amount as René DeGas’s cotton debt.) For 32. [Philippe Burty], “Chronique du jour,” La République another defense of the exhibit in a Bonapartist and generally Jrangaise, 1 April 1876, 3. He mentioned A Cotton Office in antirepublican paper see Emile Blavet, “Avant le Salon: passing, without discussing it. For similar, albeit more leftist L’Exposition des réalistes,” Le Gaulois, 31 March 1876, I.

praise, see the anonymous “L’Exposition des intransigeants,” 35. The other two reviews that were generally negative on

L’Audience, 9 April 1876, 3. Degas’s form without mentioning the New Orleans picture came 33. A. de L. [Alfred de Lostalot], “L’Exposition des impres- from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Writing in the sionmistes,” Le Bien public, 4 April 1876, 3. See Clayson (as cited most widely circulated organ of the conservative right, Albert in note 25), 156. See also “Nouvelles du jour,” Le Siécle, 29 Woltt, who since Manet’s first exhibitions had prided himself on

March 1876, 2. This brief, anonymous review in a left republican being a rebarbative old fogey, accused the “lunatic,” “near | journal recommended the exhibition for “public patronage” demented,” and “hallucinated” artists of “barricading themwhile lauding the group for its independence. Blémont (as cited selves” inside their “Intransigent” insufficiency of form. See below, note 35) likewise offered praise from the radical left for “le Albert Wolff, “Le Calendrier parisien,” Le Figaro, 3 April 1876, 1;

succés de cette entreprise de libre initiative.” “Essayez donc de faire entendre raison 4 M. Degas; dites-lui qu’il 34. Victor Cherbuliez, “Le Salon de 1876,” Revue des Deux y a en art quelques qualités ayant nom: le dessin, la couleur,

69

Degas and the Business of Art

Charles Bigot found more “incontestable qualities” in it than in the dancers or “yawning laundresses.” But his general assessment was that Degas’s execution was “always so inadequate” and that the artist’s taste led him “to the bizarre or ugly rather than to the graceful.” Although he found in A Cotton Office “an immediately accurate sense of movement” and a notable sense of absorption in individual figures, his conclusion about the painting and about Degas in general was that the artist unhappily “does not have the eye of a colorist nor always the hand of a draftsman.”3° The same stylistic issue that almost saved the picture for the conservative Bigot actually served

to depreciate it in the eyes of Manet’s old defender and liberal apologist of modernism, novelist Emile Zola. Whereas Bigot commended Desboutin and, to a lesser degree, Caillebotte for their tight finish, Zola, writing in the Russian journal Messager de l’Europe, said that Caillebotte’s style was “entirely anti-artistic, clear as glass, bourgeois.” The critic’s stipulation that Caillebotte’s work was too much like photography, to the exclusion of artistic originality (the quality he earlier had equated with “temperament” in defending Manet’s painterly style) finds echoes in his assessment of Degas’s works. Zola attributed the greatest originality, innovation, and modernity to Degas’s more painterly works and found A Cotton Office lacking in those same qualities: This painter is very taken with modernity, inner life, and everyday models. What is annoying, though, is the way he spoils everything as soon as he puts finishing touches on a work. His best pictures are sketches. As he completes his work, his draftsmanship becomes blurred and pathetic. He paints pictures like Portraits in an Office (New Orleans), half-way between a seascape and a plate from an illustrated journal. He has excellent artistic perceptions, but I am afraid his brush will never be really creative.37 Zola’s analogy to an illustrated journal would probably have stung the artist, given Degas’s intention, expressed in a letter from New Orleans, of avoiding such literal emulation. Zola’s charge that the New Orleans picture was not sufficiently painterly coincided with the critic’s more general and

Vexécution, la volonté, il vous rira au nez et vous traitera de New Orleans. réactionnaire.” The relatively suppressed facture of A Cotton Office 37. Emile Zola, “Deux Expositions d’art au mois de mai: Salon

was evidently overlooked or considered inadequate. See also de 1876 et deuxiéme exposition impressionniste,” in Russian in Clayson (as cited in note 25), 151-52. For a more positive opinion Viestnik Evropy (Le Messager de l’Europe) [Saint Petersburg]; in Le Figaro, see below, note 38. The other disapproval came, excerpted in English translation in Moffett et al. (as cited in note surprisingly, from Emile Petitdidier, who wrote under a pen name 17), 171; translated from Russian into French in Emile Zola, Le in a radical left journal. See Emile Blémont [Emile Petitdidier], Bon combat de Courbet aux impressionnistes; Anthologie d’écrits sur “Les Impressionnistes,” Le Rappel, 9 April 1876, 2-3 (p. 3 on Vart, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon (Paris, 1974), 172-86, quotation from Degas). Although this critic defended Impressionism on theoreti- 185: “Ce peintre est tres épris de modernité, de la vie d’intérieur et

cal grounds having to do with individual freedom, he hesitantly des ses types de tous les jours. L’ennui, c’est qu'il gate tout qualified his endorsement by saying that in practice the work did lorsqu’il s’agit de mettre la derniére main a une oeuvre. Ses not live up to the theory. Although he praised Caillebotte’s firm meilleurs tableaux sont des esquisses. En parachevant, son dessin modeling and lauded the realism of Degas’s dancer and laun- devient flou et lamentable; il peint des tableaux comme ses Portraits dresses, he complained about Degas’s lack of finish. Once again A dans un Bureau (Nouvelle-Orléans), 4 mi-chemin entre une marine et

Cotton Office was evidently deemed insufficiently polished. le polytype d’un journal illustré. Ses aper¢cus artistiques sont 36. Charles Bigot, “Causerie artistique: L’Exposition des excellents, mais j’ai peur que son pinceau ne devienne jamais ‘intransigeants’,” La Revue politique et littéraire, 8 April 1876, 349- créateur.” An editorial note in the French translation suggests that 52 (p. 351 on Degas), excerpted in translation in Moffett et al. (as the mention of marine (seascape) might be a mistranslation from

cited in note 17), 171; see also discussion in Clayson (as cited in the Russian. But given the presence of a seascape in the note 25), 151-52. Bigot mistakenly said Degas had been born in background of Degas’s painting, this may not be the case.

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The Exhibition in Paris

enthusiastic defense of Impressionism as a “revolutionary” movement expressing its ideological independence through defiance of academic systems. Zola thus implied that A Cotton Office was not truly or sufficiently Impressionist. In this instance the formal strategy Degas had adopted in New Orleans in hopes of selling the painting on the British market now backfired in the context of the Parisian avant-garde. Of four reviews that had positive things to say about Degas (primarily on the basis of form), two came from the press of the republican left and two from the other end of the political spectrum.

Of these, two were rather more substantial than the others.38 Alfred de Lostalot’s article in Chronique des arts et de la curiosité (an entrenched organ of officialdom) was more extensive than the brief commendation he published, as previously mentioned, in the republican Bien public. What

saved the exhibition for this critic was a conservative drawing ability evident, despite bizarre perspective, in the works of Caillebotte and Degas. Of Degas he said:

M. Degas exhibits some rapid silhouettes of laundresses and some more finished studies of the dancers of the Opera; there are some excellent parts of these latter pictures. One senses in them an artist much more instructed in his art than one would believe and than he perhaps wants to appear. The Cotton Merchant’s Shop, in New Orleans, is also a good picture which has nothing to do with revolutionary methods. In this bourgeois range, we also find worth pointing out some honest landscapes by MM. Lepic, Rouart, Tillot, Cals and B. Millet. 39

These comments indicate that the critic preferred Degas’s slicker works, which he thought revealed the artist as something of an academic malgré lui. The Cotton Office in particular was read as a good bourgeois picture precisely because it exhibited none of those “Intransigent,” painterly qualities that Zola, for one, would have preferred. Both A Cotton Office and Degas received approval on similar, but somewhat more elaborately theorized, formal grounds from Arthur Baignéres, who published a review in L’Echo [universel], a left republican journal supported by Jules Simon. Baignéres proceeded first, out of supposed politeness, to mention the work of Morisot, “the only woman,” as the most extreme, at times incoherent, example of the group’s theory of good color and bad drawing. Inflecting his remarks with subtle gender distinctions, he next described Degas as the leader of the male Impressionists and as an unorthodox draftsman, who in the New Orleans canvas presented his most “reasonable” work: 38. For the briefer mentions, see Le Masque de Fer [pseud. ], 20, quotation from 120: “M. Degas expose des rapides silhou“Echos de Paris: A travers Paris,” Le Figaro, 1 April 1876, I. ettes de blanchisseuses et des études plus achevées, d’aprés les Although writing for a rightist journal, this critic gave moderate danseuses de l"Opéra; il y a d’excellentes parties dans ces derniers support to the Impressionists and to Degas, without specifically tableaux. On y sent un artiste beaucoup plus instruic dans son art mentioning A Cotton Office. See also Baron Schop [Théodore de qu'on ne le croirait et que peut-étre il ne voudrait le paraitre. La Banville], “La Semaine parisienne; L’Exposition des intransi- Boutique de marchand de coton, i la Nouvelle-Orléans, est aussi un geants. L’Ecole des Batignolles. Impressionnistes et plein air,” Le bon tableau qui n’a rien a voir avec les procédés révolutionnaires.

National, 7 April 1876, 2-3 (p. 3 on Degas). Writing in a left Dans cette gamme bourgeois, nous trouverons encore 4 signaler republican journal, this poet and critic called Degas the leader of d*honnétes paysages de MM. Lepic, Rouart, Tillot, Cals, et B. the exhibiting artists because of the finely modeled realism of A Millet.” Partial excerpt translated in Moffett et al. (as cited in

Cotton Office. note 17), 171. As Clayson (as cited in note 25) points out (156),

39. A. de L. [Alfred de Lostalot], “L’Exposition de la rue le this review, however mixed, really counted because it appeared Peletier,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1 April 1876, 119- in a journal of academic doctrines.

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Degas and the Business of Art

At the head of the men, we place M. Degas, the pontiff, I think, of the sect of Intransigent Impressionists. He puts other qualities than Mlle. Morisot at the beck and call of the [Impressionist| system: fewer talents and more science. With him the hand is more expert than the eye, and one sees that he is a defrocked draftsman. One of the most reasonable of all his pictures, which represents cotton merchants of New Orleans, gives us faces well-modelled and drawn with care. The color is dark and not very agreeable. If one judged M. Degas only on the basis of this picture, one would be truly amazed to see him in such company, but, in the case of his dancers and laundresses, he keeps his position in the midst of the Impressionists. After establishing that A Cotton Office was not truly Impressionist, Baignéres described the laundresses as more messy. An unstated implication of his remarks was that the picture’s “virile” style was appropriate to its patriarchal, bourgeois topic, whereas the more imprecise, intuitive “feminine” style of the laundresses likewise suited the gender and class of the depicted subject. He went on to observe perceptively that all of Degas’s works shared with the Intransigents a fragmentary, cropped notion of composition that conveyed the artist’s apparently detached, yet carefully calculated, illusion of objectivity: “One of their methods that M. Degas also cherishes is to crop the canvas anywhere, to conceal the feet

or legs. One must not have the appearance of composing; the painter is passive, do not forget.” He concluded by predicting (in a manner that the artist would have relished) that in the future of Impressionism Degas would take over the place of Ingres while Monet would occupy that of Delacroix.+#° This overview of the remarks of critics who approved or disapproved of Degas and/or of A Cotton Office primarily for reasons of form thus indicates that the New Orleans painting definitely saved Degas’s reputation among those critics who otherwise would have been ideologically or aesthetically disposed to condemn him. The picture’s relatively meticulous finish meanwhile lost Degas the support of Zola, the staunchest apologist of modernism. But Zola’s singular opinion in a foreign journal was largely outweighed by other less vanguard defenders of Impressionism who found the painting moderately modernist without being extremely or offensively avant-garde. That this tally increased considerably when content was taken into consideration helps explain the essentially conservative appeal of Degas’s chosen subject.

V

Of some sixteen critics who addressed Degas’s content, only four were negative and none of the four singled out A Cotton Office for specific comment, presumably because it would not have fit 4o. Arthur Baignéres, “Exposition de peinture par un groupe avec soin. La couleur est terne et peu agréable. Si on ne jugeait M. d’artistes, rue Le Peletier, 11,” L’Echo [universel], 13 April 1876, 3: Degas que d’aprés cette toile, on s*étonnerait fort de le voir en “En téte des hommes, nous placons M. Degas, le pontife, je crois, pareille compagnie, mais, avec ses tableaux de danseuses et de de la secte des intransigeants impressionnistes. I] met aux ordres repasseuses, i] ticnt son rang au milieu des impressionnistes. . . . du syst¢me d’autres qualités que Mlle. Morisot: moins de dons et Un de leurs procédés que chérit aussi M. Degas, c’est de couper la plus de science. Chez lui la main est plus experte que Poeil, et l’on toile n’importe ou, de supprimer les pieds ou les jambes. I] ne faut voit que c’est un dessinateur défroqué. Un de ses tableaux, le plus pas avoir l’air de composer; le peintre est passif, ne l’oublions pas.” raisonnable de tous, qui représente des marchands de coton de la An excerpt from this review is translated without comment by Nouvelle-Orléans, montre des visages bien modelés et dessinés Armstrong (as cited in note 21), 29.

72

The Exhibition ir Parts

their prescriptions. Three of the disapproving notices came from the rightist press. The most substantial, written in the form of a dialogue between the reviewer, satirist and caricaturist Bertall [Charles-Albert d’Arnoux], and a fictive “Dr. X,” was published in Le Soir, a center right journal owned by a prominent banker. Whereas Bertall himself patronizingly described the folly of the exhibitors, he allowed some words in defense of the “art of the future” to slip from the mouth of his imaginary interlocutor. When Bertall assailed “bizarre sketches” and “grotesque fantasies” of formlessness, “Dr. X” defended the group on the basis of its intelligent understanding of otherwise unnoticed modern subjects characteristic of the epoch. He also pointed out the growing market for the “originality” of Impressionist pictures, a notable observation in view of Le Soir’s reputation for defending financial interests.#! Like Bertall’s “Dr. X,” the several critics who defended Degas’s content generally approved of

what they saw as a positivistic representation of characteristically modern subjects.42 Most were either essentially or moderately conservative to the degree that they were won over to realist subject matter by the less intransigent form of A Cotton Office, which was seen as reinforcing its bourgeois messages. Several of them mentioned its American subject as part of its appeal. Given French loyalties to the South during the Civil War, it makes sense that the American aspects of the painting would be less problematic in Paris than they might have been in Manchester following the cotton famine.

Of the reviews that specifically praised the picture in such terms, only two came from the republican press. Alexandre Pothey managed to be a bit more elaborate than Armand Silvestre’s brief mention in the left republican journal L’Opinion, but did so in the conservative republican newspaper La Presse. Although he mistakenly located the Cotton Office in New York, Pothey was clearly drawn to the picture’s modern subject matter of American commerce, which, he thought, 41. Bertall [Charles-Albert d’Amoux], “Exposition des im- L’Indépendance belge, 2 April 1876, 1. [Jules Antoine] Castagnary, pressionnalistes, rue Lepeletier,” Le Soir, 15 April 1876, 3. See “Salon de 1876,” Le Siécle, 6 May 1876, 1-2. Castagnary, who also Georges Maillard, “Chronique: Les Impressionnalistes,” Le was at the time an elected member of the municipal council of Pays, 4 April 1876, 3 (a Bonapartist newspaper popular among Paris, wrote his review of both the Salon and the Impressionists the military), and Emile Porcheron, “Promenades d’un flaneur: in the form of an open letter to the Chamber of Deputies. Calling Les Impressionnistes,” Le Soleil, 4 April 1876, 2-3 (a journal of for reform of the government’s official exhibition system and of the center right). See also Clayson (as cited in note 25), 151. A narrow academic dogmatism, he called the Impressionists the rather more moralizing, yet equally negative, set of critical inheritors of the oppositional tradition of Delacroix, Théodore

criteria were applied to the exhibition by Henry James in a Rousseau, Courbet, and Manet. The Impressionist exhibir. he review, “Parisian Festivity: Cynical Artists,” New York Tribune, said, counteracted the conventional and artificial art of the Salon

13 May 1876, 2. James took issue with what he saw as the with an art of fresh newness and the study of nature, a naturalist painters’ preference for topics from “unadorned reality,” without art that he said included “even the choreographed fantasies of M. traditional formal “arrangement, embellishment, selection,” and Degas.” He alluded to the issue of Degas’s own considerable beauty. He pointed to what he saw as moral differences between artifice and ostensible disregard for plein-air subjects. See also an “instinct of righteousness” encoded rather pedantically in the Mallarmé (as cited above in note 24), 33. When Mallarmé got to English Pre-Raphaelite devotion to laborious, patient execution the work of Degas, he focused on the lower-class dancers and and a more cynical abjuration of virtue in the loose French laundresses rather than the Cotron Office. Although he denied that treatment of form. Although he made no mention of A Cotton Degas pursued a trite voluptuousness in the female subjects, his Office, one suspects that whereas its “English” facture might have own eroticized descriptions of the dancers’ “semi-nakedness” and been considered more acceptable by Jamesian standards, its non- of the relative state of undress of the laundresses undercut his narrative, unidealized content and lack of traditional pictorial brief mention of the subjects of poverty and work depicted in the

format decidedly would not. latter. His formal comments about “the bold, yet profoundly 42. Three critics did so in general terms without mentioning complicated attitudes” of the dancers and about the “strange new A Cotton Office. See Jules Claretie, “Le Mouvement parisien: beauty” of Degas’s mastery of drawing could conceivably have

L’Exposition des intransigeants;s M. Degas et ses amis,” applied to A Cotton Office as well. 73

Degas and the Business of Art

found apt expression in the “scientific” drawing and individualized gestures of merchants, agents, and clients. Rather than finding the cropped composition problematic or fragmented, he evidently saw it as “happily distributed” for the subject in question. 43 It is significant that as we move from the republican press to that of the center and Bonapartist right, this kind of approbation increases and becomes more elaborately phrased. Marius Chaumelin, an old adversary of Manet, writing in the center right journal Gazette des étrangers, was cautiously positive about the Impressionists as a whole, yet saved his best words of praise for the more precise paintings of Degas and Caillebotte. A Cotton Office was at the top of his list and he described its content, and, to a lesser degree, its form, more extensively than any other critic in 1876: I do not believe the 1876 Salon offers us many interiors as remarkably painted as Degas’s Portraits in an Office, in New Orleans. There is nothing to say about the composition except that the figures are not posed. They are grouped—or rather scattered—yjust as you would see them in a wholesaler’s shop in the rue du Sentier [near the Paris Bourse]. The main figure is an old gentleman wearing a black frock coat and a top hat. He sits in the foreesround, examining a piece of cotton through his glasses. This fellow lives. His bearing is so true that it is deceiving; his expression is indicated with extraordinary sensitivity. Behind him, an American [sic] smokes a cigarette and tilts back on his chair nonchalantly, reading the Daily Telegraph [sic]. To the right a bookkeeper standing in front of a table examines a register. In the background seven or eight other people are placed around a large table spread with cotton. This is a subject that is in no way classic. The academicians can laugh all they want about it, but it will not disappoint those who love accurate, frankly modern painting, and who think that the expression of ordinary life and acute execution ought to count. It is hard to explain why Degas, who in this picture seems to have wished to rival the Dutch painters in delicacy and precision, felt that he had to make concessions elsewhere to the school of spots [taches]. Despite Degas’s accurate and firm draftsmanship, his Laundresses will never get my business: the laundry that they are ironing is repulsively dirty. 43. Alex{andre] Pothey, “Chronique,” La Presse, 31 March posent pas: elles sont groupées, ou plutét dispersées, absolument 1876, 3: “M. Degaz [sic] nous offre une scéne américaine tout 4 comme vous pourrez les voir dans un magasin de vente en gros,

fait remarquable. C’est un magasin de New York [sic], ot le ruc du Sentier. Le personnage principal est un vieux monsieur coton se vend sur échantillon. Marchand, commis, clients— vétu d’une redingote noire et coiffé d’un chapeau a haute forme, quinze ou vingt personnages, —sont heureusement distribués qui est assis au premier plan et qui examine, 4 travers ses lunettes,

dans cet intérieur et dessinés avec une science rare dans les un morceau de coton en rame. Ce bonhomme vit. Son attitude attitudes variées.” See also Clayson (as cited in note 25), 155-56. est d’une vérité qui fait illusion; l’expression de sa physionomie Armand Silvestre, “Exposition de la rue Le Peletier,” L’Opinion est indiquée avec une finesse extraordinaire. Derriére lui, un nationale, 2 April 1876, 3, praised Degas’s “truth” and said “The Américain [sic] fume une cigarette et se renverse nonchalamment

Portraits in an Office is an utterly clever painting and we could sur sa chaise, en lisant le Daily Telegraph [sic]. A droite, un spend days in front of it.” This short commendation was as comptable, debout devant une tablette, compulse un registre. specific as the republican left managed to be in its response to the Sept 4 huit autres personnes sont placées, dans le fond, autour New Orleans picture in 1876. Excerpt translated in Moffett et al. d’une grande table sur laquelle du coton est étalé.

(as cited in note 17), 171. See also Clayson (as cited in note 25), Voila un sujet qui n’a assurément rien de classique. Les

$5. académiciens pourront en rire; mais il ne déplaira pas aux gens 44. Marius Chaumelin, “Actualités: L’Exposition des in- qui aiment la peinture exacte et franchement moderne, qui

transigeants,” La Gazette des étrangers, 8 April 1876, 1-2 (p. 2 on pensent que l’expression de la vie et la finesse de |’exécution Degas): “Je ne crois pas que le Salon de 1876 nous offre beaucoup doivent étre comptées pour quelque chose. On s’explique d’intérieurs aussi remarquablement peints que le tableau de M. difficilement que M. Degas qui, dans ce tableau, semble avoir Degas intitulé: Portraits dans un bureau, a la Nouvelle-Orléans. De la voulu rivaliser de délicatesse et de netteté avec les Hollandais, ait

composition, il n’y a rien 4 dire, si ce n’est que les figures ne cru devoir faire ailleurs des concessions 4 l’école des taches. Ses

74

The Exhibition in Paris

This conservative critic was thus quite comfortable with the frankly modern subject of A Cotton Office, even though, as he pointed out, it was not academic. He even was willing to accommodate the scattered formal arrangement of the leisurely figures because this feature, along with the individualized physiognomies that realist critic Duranty would likewise praise, was seen to give the picture a greater illusion of reality. (The illusion obviously worked, as evidenced by the critic’s mistaken identification of René DeGas as “American,” based on his nonchalant pose.) But what obviously won Chaumelin over was the “clean” Dutch precision (netteté) of the execution of the painting, this in marked contrast to the lack of finish and the “repulsively dirty” subject of the Laundresses. That formal distinction was again modulated with class and gender difference was echoed in the critic’s stated preference for Caillebotte’s more precise and masculine Floor-scrapers in a

bourgeois interior. The critical success of A Cotton Office thus emerged as Impressionism was accommodated by a recognizably conservative ideology. Similar ideas were presented by the critic d’Olby in the militaristic newspaper Le Pays*5 and were given a particularly “American” and class reading by Louis Enault in the Bonapartist journal Le Constitutionnel. Enault’s positive, if rather Tocquevillean, opinion of what he saw as the accurate, bourgeois realism of the New Orleans picture should be read in light of his sneering diatribe against the lower-class content of the Laundresses (probably L. 686, private collection, Paris): M. Edgard [sic] Degas is perhaps one of the most intransigent of this intransigent company. I would really have to feel guilty of a very large crime in order to consent to stare for twenty-four hours at these two laundresses, one of whom presses on her iron with such heaviness and awkwardness, while the other yawns disgracefully, stretching her arms, with an atrociously coarse gesture. M. Degas, who has not been afraid to bore the public, exhibits no fewer than twenty canvases, all of about the same quality and showing the same unfortunate compositional preoccupations. This is Realism at its gloomiest and most vexing. I make an exception, nevertheless, for the painting bearing the rather bizarre title of Portrait [sic] in an Office. The painting so designated, or disguised, is nothing more than a collection of cotton merchants examining the precious commodity that is today one of the fortunes of America. It is cold, it is bourgeois; but it is seen in an exact and accurate way, and what is more, it is rendered correctly.*®

Blanchisseuses, d’un dessin d’ailleurs si juste et si ferme, n’auront transigeants dans la galerie Durand-Ruelle [sic],” Le Constitupas ma pratique: le linge qu’elles repassent est d’une malpropreté tionnel, 10 April 1876, 2: “M. Edgard [sic] Degas est peut-étre un

repoussante.” (Excerpt translated in Moffett et al. [as cited in des plus intransigeants de cette intransigeante compagnie. II

note 17], 171, 175) faudrait vraiment que je me sentisse coupable d’un bien grand 45. G. d’Olby, “Salon de 1876: Avant ouverture. Exposition crime pour consentir 4 garder sous mes yeux pendant vingt-quatre des intransigeants, chez M. Durand-Ruel, rue Le Peletier, 11,” Le heures ces deux blanchisseuses, dont ]’une appuye avec tant de Pays, 10 April 1876, 3. This critic reconciled himself to discussing lourdeur et de gaucherie sur son fer, tandis que l'autre baille ignothe “revolutionary” painters because of the attention they had blement, en étirant ses bras, avec un geste atrocement canaille. M. garnered in the art world. Like Chaumelin, d’Olby praised the Degas qui n’a pas crainte de lasser la patience du public, n’expose “qualines of truth and individualism” he found in the portraits in pas moins de vingt toiles, 4 peu prés de la méme valeur, et dans la A Cotton Office. He doubted whether Degas’s sketch of dancers composition desquelles il semble avoir obéi aux mémes préoccupawas really a painting, in spite of its observation of movement. He tions malheureuses. C’est le réalisme dans ce qu’ila de plus triste et branded Monet and Pissarro as true “Intransigents” and preferred de plus facheux. Je fais cependant une exception pour le tableau

the works of Degas, Lepic, and Caillebotte for their more portant ce titre au moins bizarre: Portrait [sic] dans un burean. Le traditionally modeled form. The approval of A Cotton Office was tableau ainsi désigné, ou déguisé, n’est autre chose qu’une once again contingent upon the rejection of intransigence. collection de marchands de cotons examinant la précieuse denrée 46. Louis Enault, “Mouvement artistique: L’Exposition des in- qui est aujourd”hui une des fortunes de Amérique. C’est froid,

75

Degas and the Business of Art

Although this critic seems to have been slightly bothered by the conflation of portrait and genre in the picture, he clearly saw it as an exception to Degas’s supposed intransigence. The feature of the “cold” American content that most clearly caught his attention was the commercial exchange of the “precious commodity,” words that uncannily echo Degas’s description of the depicted “precious material” in his letter about the painting written to Tissot from New Orleans. The favorable opinions of A Cotton Office expressed in the rightist press were unwittingly echoed, albeit without the explicit class inflection, by well-meaning apologists for Impressionism

88

writing in the conservative-dominated art press.47 Most notably, in the usually conservative L’ Artiste, the critic Pierre Dax saw fit to reprint an extremely laudatory article from L’Esprit moderne written by Georges Riviére, who was a staunch friend of the Impressionists and who was to found the apologist organ L’Impressionniste in 1877, to help promote publicity and marketing. The fact that his positive review was reprinted in L’ Artiste indicates the degree of official accommodation Degas

and the Impressionists managed to achieve in 1876, and the place of the New Orleans painting in that qualified arrival. Riviere emphasized that the main message of the exhibition was “a profound individuality,” a quality he found confirmed in Degas’s American picture.4

VI

This notion of individuality, which was noted by several reviewers in Degas’s depiction of physiognomy and gesture, inspired in Edmond Duranty some of the more trenchant critical ideas relevant

c’est bourgeois; mais c’est vu d’une fagon exacte et juste, et de plus Flemish painters. He has one such finished picture here, the c’est correctement rendu.” Excerpts translated in Moffett et al. (as interior of a cotton-warehouse in New Orleans, perfect alike as cited in note 17), 171 and Armstrong (as cited in note 21), 29. regards observation and rendering.” In applauding the painting’s

47. Among these, Philippe Burty, who had already reviewed crisp realism and modernity, the critic did not question the the exhibition in positive general terms in Gambetta’s La degree to which its polished finish—of which he approved to the République francaise, wrote a more lengthy and congratulatory same degree as the more sketchy works—did or did not depart account in an English language review: “Fine Art. The Exhibi- from the “academical system” that he had earlier censured. Nor tion of the ‘Intransigeants’,” The Academy [London], 15 April did he question the fit (or lack thereof) between the picture’s 1876, 363-64 (p. 364 on Degas). In this article, Burty drew a entrenched bourgeois subject and the oppositional social ideolstronger and more Mallarmé-like social analogy between poor, ogy with which he had begun his discussion. Excerpted in hardworking members of society and the collective initiative and Moffett et al. (as cited in note 17), 171. See Clayson (as cited in

ideological independence of the Impressionist artists. When he note 25), 154-55. See also “Le Groupe d’artistes de la rue Le got to Degas, with whom he concluded the piece, he gave his Peletier,” Le Moniteur des arts, 21 April 1876, 1-2 (p. 2 on Degas). highest commendation to A Cotton Office: “Then, finally, there This writer rejected Degas’s Laundresses as “vulgar,” but comare several sketches and a picture by M. Degas, who introduced mended A Cotton Office for its realism and tight execution. himself to the London public at M. Deschamps’ exhibition. M. 48. G. Riviére, “Les Intransigeants de la peinture,” L’Esprit moDegas is a painter of extreme sensibility and of not less extreme derne, 13 April 1876, 7-8, reprinted by Pierre Dax, “Chronique,” boldness. He more often throws his sketches on to the canvas L’ Artiste, 1 May 1876, 347-49 (p. 348 on Degas): “M. Degas est un

than takes time to finish them; but these in themselves are maitre observateur et un dessinateur impeccable comme notre sufficient to prove the power of his imagination, his science, his temps en produit peu. Son tableau des Cotonniers est trés-€tonnant. intimate acquaintance with modern life, with the gestures, effect, On y sent circuler ]’atmosphére étouffante du bureau. Et son

the athletics, peculiar to each of his subjects—races, washer- ensemble résume toute la civilisation américaine. Le vieux women at their work, or the green-room of the Opera. His eye is monsieur examinant le coton, au premier plan l’employée penché

true. The vigorous stroke of his pencil and the truth of his sur les livres, le jeune homme accoudé prés de la caisse sont tréscolour-indications show the talent of a master. When he gives remarquables d’attitude.” Excerpt translated (and misattributed to himself the time to complete and finish anything, he displays Dax) in Moffett et al. (as cited in note 17), 171; see also discussion qualities which are analogous to those that distinguished the early by Clayson (as cited in note 25), 156-57.

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The Exhibition in Paris

to A Cotton Office, though not the most extensive specific description of the painting itself. Duranty defended Degas and the Impressionists more in terms of Realism than of pictorial modernism. ‘This

critical position emerged from Duranty’s own background as a Realist novelist, founder of the short-lived journal Le Réalisme (1856), and author of articles on physiognomy (1867) and caricature (1870-71). The essay on physiognomy in particular had established the underlying theories about the legibility of individuality that Duranty would apply to Impressionism in 1876.+9 In his famous essay The New Painting, which was published as a pamphlet at the time of the second Impressionist exhibit, Duranty offered theory more than analysis of individual works and evidently used Degas as his paradigm. Although Georges Riviére was probably exaggerating when he later claimed that The New Painting was “Degas’s manifesto signed by Duranty,” it is likely that,

since Degas and Duranty came from similar backgrounds, had similar personalities, and were friends from Café Guerbois days, Degas’s ideas may have contributed to the essay.°° In turn, Degas surely would have welcomed the publicity and support The New Painting provided in 1876. Duranty’s theoretical comments in 1876 have a specific bearing on A Cotton Office. He stressed that pictorial content should be receptive to, and expressive of, the salient gestures, facial expressions, and social ambience of the modern individual. His now-famous remarks constituted one of

the first inventories of Impressionist iconography and its penchant for partial glimpses or synecdoche:

What we need are the special characteristics of the modern individual—in his clothing, in social situations, at home, or on the street. . . . [I]t is the study of states of mind reflected by physiognomy and clothing, the observation of the relationships of a man to his apartment, or of the particular influence of his profession on him, as reflected in the gestures he makes: [the observation] of all aspects of the environment in which he evolves and develops. A back should reveal temperament, age, and social position, a pair of hands should reveal the magistrate or the merchant, and a gesture should reveal an entire range of feelings. Physiognomy will tell us with certainty that one man is dry, orderly, and meticulous, while another is the epitome of carelessness and disorder. Attitude will reveal to us whether a person is going to a business meeting, or is returning from a tryst... . An atmosphere is created in every interior, along with a certain family aspect that is

taken on by the objects that fill it... . [W]e will no longer separate the figure from the background. . . . Instead, surrounding him and behind him are the furniture, fireplaces, curtains, and walls that indicate his financial position, class, and profession. The individual will be at a piano, examining a sample of cotton in an office, or waiting in the wings for the moment to go onstage, or ironing on a trestle table." 49. Edmond Duranty, “Sur la physionomie,” Revue libérale 0 racist, and collectivist notion that paradoxically undercut his (25 July 1867), 499-523. Examining the theories of Gall, Lavater, stated concern with singular and distinct individuality. and others, he suggested that viewed with the proper skepticism, 50. Georges Rivitre, Mf. Degas, bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1935), physiognomy could be a science allowing one to determine char- 81; see also Marcel Crouzet, Un Méconnu du réalisme: Duranty acter through salient traits of facial expression classified according (Paris, 1964), 332-37.

to nationality, race, heredity, profession, education, and social 51. Louis Emile Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle peinture a class. He suggested that just as there was a working-class physiog- propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel

nomy, so there was a bourgeois one: a deterministic, implicitly (Paris, 1876), here adapted from the translation in Moffett et al.

77

;;;:;;

Degas and the Business of Art

Many of these remarks, including those about the “family aspect” of objects in a room, about the interior as expressive of “financial position, class, and profession,” and about the indication of profession through gesture, most notably that of “examining a sample of cotton in an office,” connect the text both theoretically and specifically with A Cotton Office in New Orleans. The physiognomic aspects of portraiture in the painting, which had likewise caught the eye of critics d’Olby and Chaumelin, were united by Duranty with a more expanded notion of expressive genre consisting of atmosphere, interiors, furniture, clothing, and gesture, so as to give full fruition to the idea of representing modern individuality. 5? In 1876, Duranty also made some perceptive comments about Degas’s form, which, although equally general in theory, have specific applicability to the New Orleans painting. The new subject matter of the modern individual and his social milieu was best expressed for Duranty in drawing, in the “sharpness of focus” that occurred when the artist’s pencil became “the inseparable companion to the idea” of modern life. Here Degas was again clearly his model: “Thus, the series of new ideas that led to the development of this artistic vision took shape in the mind of a certain draftsman, one of our own, one of the new painters exhibiting in these galleries, a man of uncommon talent and exceedingly rare spirit.”53 Duranty proceeded to sidestep the more typically Impressionist issue of plein-air landscape in order to emphasize the “special laws of light and visual language” of modern lives lived “in rooms and in streets.” His comments seemed more dependent on paintings like A Cotton Office or Caillebotte’s Floor-scrapers than on landscapes by Monet or Morisot. This is corrobo-

rated by his suggestion that art should imitate a rapidly exposed, yet imaginary, “colored photograph of an interior,” even though, as we have seen, Degas’s representation of the New Orleans office did not emulate photography in the strictest sense. Duranty described perspective in relation to the phenomenology of perception, employing terms reminiscent of, but more expansive than, comments about Degas’s cropping and scattering (as cited in note 17), 43-45; reprinted in French, 481~82: “[C]e coton dans son bureau commercial, ou il attendra derriére le qu’il nous faut, c’est la note spéciale de l’individu moderne, dans décor le moment d’entrer en scéne, ou il appliquera le fer 4 son vétement, au milieu de ses habitudes sociales, chez lui ou repasser sur la table 4 tréteaux.”

dans la rue.... [C]’est l’étude des reflets moraux sur les 52. Duranty’s catalogue of appropriate modern subject matter physionomies et sur l’habit, l’observation de |’intimité de had quite an influence on the younger novelist and critic homme avec son appartement, du trait spécial que lui imprime Huysmans, who echoed them in 1880, when he commended sa profession, des gestes qu’elle l’entraine 4 faire, des coupes Degas’s full range of topics and retrospectively included the d’aspect sous lesquelles il se développe et s’accentue le mieux. “cotton merchants in America” in a pre-Symbolist encomium of Avec un dos, nous voulons que se révéle un tempérament, un modern art. See Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’ Exposition des indépenAge, un état social; par une paire de mains, nous devons exprimer dents en 1880,” L’Art moderne (Paris, 1883), 113: “Une peintre de la

un magistrat ou un commercant; par un geste, toute une suite de vie moderne était né, et un peintre qui ne dérivait de personne, qui

sentiments. La physionomie nous dira qu’a coup sir celui-ci est ne ressemblait 4 aucun, qui apportait une saveur d’art toute un homme rangé, sec et méticuleux, et que celui-la est nouvelle, des procédés d’exécution tout nouveaux. Blanchisseuses Vinsouciance et le désordre méme. L’attitude nous apprendre que dans leurs boutiques, danseuses aux répétitions, chanteuses de

ce personnage va 4 un rendez-vous d’affaires, et que cet autre café-concert, salles de théatre, chevaux de course, portraits,

revient d’un rendez-vous d’amour. marchands de coton en Amérique, femmes sortant du bain, effets

.,. une atmosphére se crée ainsi dans chaque intéricur, de de boudoirs et de loges, tous ces sujets si divers ont été traités par méme qu’un air de famille entre tous les meubles et les objets qui cet artiste qui est réputé cependant n’avoir jamais peint que des

le remplissent. danseuses!” See also Armstrong (as cited in note 21), 169-71.

... nous ne séparons plus le personnage du fond. .. . Mais 53. Duranty (as cited in note 51), 44 (482): “Aussi la série des autour de lui et derritre lui sont des meubles, des cheminées, des idées nouvelle s’est-elle formée surtout dans le cerveau d’un tentures de murailles, une paroi que exprime sa fortune, sa classe, dessinateur, un des nétres, un de ceux qui expose dans ces salles, son métier: il sera 4 son piano, ou il examinera son échantillon de un homme de plus rare talent et de plus rare esprit.”

78

The Exhibition in Paris

by other critics like Lostalot, Chaumelin, and Baignéres. Here his remarks had quite evidently learned lessons from A Cotton Office:

Our vantage point is not always located in the center of a room whose two side walls converge towards the back wall; the lines of sight and angles of cornices do not always join with mathematical regularity and symmetry. Nor does our point of view always exclude the large expanse of ground or floor in the immediate foreground. Sometimes our viewpoint is very high, sometimes very low; as a result we lose sight of the ceiling, and everything crowds into our immediate field of vision, and furniture is abruptly cropped. Our peripheral vision is restricted at a certain distance from us, as if limited by a frame, and we see objects to the side only as permitted by the edge of this frame. 54 For Duranty this radical perspective, with pronouncedly de-centered angles and cropped views of figures, was modernism from the point of view of the realist draftsman. As Armstrong has pointed out, Duranty’s critical vocabulary did not really respond to the painterly surface-effects of Impressionism. Instead, he was devoted to the crisp, draftsmanlike legibility of physiognomy. Yet, at the same time, he was fascinated by the tendency toward illegibility he found in Degas’s disjunctive pictorial language. In practice, Duranty’s discursive delight in deciphering fragmented space, elusive personalities, contradictory gestures, and ambiguous social signs in art was what, according to Armstrong, undermined his own positivist theory of absolute visual intelligibility and concomitantly depoliticized his notion of Realism.55 Although Duranty’s requirements for visual readability were more nuanced, allusive, and sophisticated than those preferred by art collectors in Victorian Manchester, he nonetheless wound up, perhaps unwittingly, agreeing with the more conservative Parisian critics who in 1876 praised Degas’s A Cotton Office precisely because it exhibited a crisp appearance they found lacking in more painterly, intransigent pictures. But what they missed and what Duranty perceptively admired in Degas was the way the artist's simulation of legibility in fact served to dislocate, complicate, and even undermine straightforward, cohesive, unified messages. Where Duranty more clearly agreed with the ideological defenders of Impressionism and “Intransigence” was in his overriding conclusion about the group’s ideals of freedom from restraints and liberty of commerce. His essay began with an extended disparagement of the academic system of painting and proceeded to defend the avant-garde, beginning with Courbet, for its declaration of freedom of expression. In the concluding portions he reiterated that the exhibitors at Durand-Ruel did not have a unified dogma and that they were above all artists of indepen-

dent temperament. Reiterating the word liberté and the notion of lack of restraint, he drew an economic analogy: 54. Duranty (as cited in note 51), 45 (482): “Notre point de perdant le plafond, ramassant les objets dans les dessous, coupant vue n’est pas toujours au centre d’une piéce avec ses deux parois les meubles inopinément. Notre oeil arrété de cété A une certaine

latérales qui fuient vers celle du fond; il ne raméne pas toujours distance de nous, semble borné par un cadre, et il ne voit les les lignes et les angles des corniche avec une régularité et une objets latéraux qu’engagés dans le bord ce cadre.” Compare the symétrie mathématiques; il n’est pas toujours libre non plus de spatial comments of Baignéres and Chaumelin, above, notes 40 supprimer les grands déroulements de terrain et de plancher au and 44. premier plan; il est quelquefois trés haut, quelquefois trés bas, 55. Armstrong (as cited in note 21), chapter 2, 73-100.

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Degas and the Business of Art |

Laissez faire, laissez passer. Do you not see in these attempts the nervous and irresistible need to escape the conventional, the banal, the traditional, as well as the need to find oneself again and run far from this bureaucracy of the mind with all its rules that weigh on us in this country? Do you not see the need to free your brow from this leaden skullcap of artistic routine and old refrains, to abandon at last this common pasture where we all graze like sheep?5°

Invoking the principle of laissez-faire, which, as I have suggested, may have inflected Degas’s conception of A Cotton Office for the Manchester market, Duranty thus drew an affinity between the exhibiting artists and entrepreneurial businessmen forging a new market for their innovative products. His analogy was, however, undercut by his hopes (stated earlier in the essay) that “a certain draftsman” (meaning Degas) would continue to maintain a singular lack of interest in employing his talents “as a businessman like so many others,” even as he inspired other artists who profited from

his example.s7 Duranty’s subtly contradictory messages underline the very ambivalence about marketing that made Degas’s necessary role as artist-entrepreneur an uncomfortable one.

Vil

This overview of the mixed critical responses in 1876 to Degas and to A Cotton Office in New Orleans, ranging from the glancing gibe to the more elaborate defense, indicates that the issue of commerce was an important consideration in the interpretation of the painting’s form and content, even by reviewers who disagreed with one another ideologically. As we have seen, those critics who approved or disapproved of the exhibition or of Degas according to quite general principles tended, although not absolutely, to divide along political lines, with the republicans of the left and center giving praise and the conservative and rightist press condemning. The critics who judged Degas and the New Orleans picture essentially on the basis of form offered an equal distribution of positive and negative opinions, but the defense did not come solely from the ideological defenders of intransi-

gence. Of the critics who also took content into consideration, those who defended Degas were primarily from the conservative press. The most extensive specific defense of A Cotton Office, that of Chaumelin, came from the center right. Of the twelve reviews specifically favorable to the painting, eight were published in the conservative press. The issue of finish was clearly a major factor in the painting’s critical success, especially among those who would have been ideologically disposed to censure. The picture was, for the most part, read as a conservative, or at least less threatening, exception to intransigent style. Paradoxically, the

virtual absence of the kind of innovative, sketchy facture that cautious critics castigated in other works (including Degas’s) as a mere marketing ploy, made the New Orleans painting potentially 56. Duranty (as cited in note $1), 38-42, 40-47 (477-80, 483- rengaines, d’abandonner enfin cette pature commune ou l’on 84), quotation from 46 (483): “Laissez faire, laissez passer. Ne tend en troupeaux.” See also discussion in Robert L. Herbert, voyez-vous pas dans ces tentatives le besoin nerveux et irrésist- “Impressionism, Originality and Laissez-Faire,” Radical History

ible d’échapper au convenu, au banal, au traditionnel, de se Review xxxvil (1987), 7-15, especially 11.

retrouver soi-méme, de courir loin de cette bureaucratie de 57. Duranty (as cited in note 51), 44 (482): “en homme esprit, tout en réglements, qui pése sur nous en ce pays, de d’affaires comme tant d’autres.” dégager son front de la calotte de plomb des routines et des 80

The Exhibition in Paris

more marketable to those segments of the audience inclined to traditional taste. As we have seen, the stylistic approach Degas had originally employed in New Orleans in order to aim the picture at the

British market proved successful among most Parisian critics as well. The relative lack of painterliness, however, lost him the progressive support of avant-garde apologist Zola. The sympathetic Duranty, who perhaps unwittingly confirmed the more conservative taste for Realist legibility and draftsmanship, nonetheless found in Degas’s dislocated compositional arrangement ample

evidence of modernist innovation. This assessment pointed toward (but did not pursue) more complicated issues of illegibility.

When subject matter was taken into consideration, A Cotton Office garnered the respect of conservative critics largely because of the different meanings of class and gender they read when comparing this patriarchal, bourgeois scene of leisurely business to what they saw as the coarse, dirty, and vulgar labor of the working-class Laundresses. (As I have argued, stylistic differences confirmed this preference.) The issue of the representation of physiognomic individualism, which Chaumelin and especially Duranty praised, was linked by others, including Pothey, Riviére, and Enault, to the American aspects of the scene and, most especially by Enault, to rather Tocquevillean notions of the cold individualism of American commodity culture. Such messages were evidently accommodated more easily in Paris than they would have been in Manchester. Yet the discreetly ambivalent hint at speculative risk and dissolving business in New Orleans was lost on Parisian audiences.

As A Cotton Office in New Orleans achieved a qualified, conservative success in 1876, it seemed somehow to encode and exemplify the commercial aspirations and intentions of the exhibition as a whole, an exhibition whose heterogeneous marketing strategies may have complicated its social messages.5® The exhibition’s direct appeal to the art market, which some critics condemned as a mercenary exploitation of a gullible public, was turned by others into a positive, progressive act of independence from government control. Duranty clearly enunciated Impressionism’s innovative principle of laissez-faire; Cherbuliez pointed out the salability of sketches in the conservative Revue des Deux Mondes; and even Bertall alluded satirically to the growing market for the pictorial “originality” of Impressionism, thus translating allegedly “radical” aesthetics into market value. Although Duranty implied that Degas might not prefer the role of artist-businessman, it was all too apparent from the deteriorating financial situation of Degas’s family that the entrepreneurial issues the artist had already broached in producing, marketing, and exhibiting the New Orleans painting would continue to press him to sell it. As he sought and finally found another audience for it, the picture’s accumulated meanings would expand.

58. The point about the exhibition’s lack of a clear social message is made by Clayson (as cited in note 25), 157.

SI

The Cotton Office in P OLLOWING THE SECOND IMPRESSIONIST exhibit in Paris, Degas wrote a letter on 15 May

1876 to Charles W. Deschamps in London in which he asked: “Do you still want my Cotonniers?” and described his difficult financial situation: “As for me, I am going to be sans le sou in a few days.”! Deschamps had formerly been the secretary, then the director of Durand-Ruel’s London gallery, which had closed in the winter of 1874-75. Deschamps had taken over the gallery on his own and Degas had successfully exhibited and sold four ballet scenes there in April 1876.3 Continuing to request Deschamps to send him money he was owed, Degas wrote on I June 1876, that Deschamps would soon receive “my cotton.” He elaborated upon his chronic money troubles, urging Deschamps to sell more of his work: “It will be necessary not only for paying our liquidation, but also to put something in my pocket so as to get through the summer. . . . What anguish I

have already suffered, both for my life and for my art which I love so much and which will slip away from me if the harm becomes even a little bit worse. Infernal adventure!”+ The promising career as artist-entrepreneur of which Degas had written with such hope in New Orleans was not turning out the way he had planned. When Degas again wrote Deschamps on 16 June 1876, from Naples, where he had gone on matters related to the liquidation of the family bank, his gloom about business had deepened: “How much time one wastes on matters quite apart from one’s life, on undertaking humiliating procedures, taking

part in interminable discussions that one doesn’t even understand, to save one’s poor name from bankruptcy! Jam thus in Naples, with my brother Achille, to obtain from our Neapolitan creditors the signature of a concordat that has been dragging on for six months.” Pressing Deschamps to send him 4,500 francs he was still owed (presumably from the recent sale of some of the dance scenes to Captain Henry Hill of Brighton), he said he was even willing to sell A Cotton Office at a reduced price: “And 1. Theodore Reff, “Some Unpublished Letters of Degas,” London gallery after the ninth exhibition of the Society of French Art Bulletin L (March 1968), 90: “Voulez-vous encore mes Coton- Arusts in November 1874.

niers?... Moi-méme je vais étre sans le sou dans quelques 3. Pickvance, 265-66. jours.” The encore (“still/again”) perhaps suggests that the 4. Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris: “Vous allez recevoir mon picture had been with Deschamps at some point before the 1876 cofon, et surtout quelques petites choses que vous devez sfirement exhibition. The title Cotonniers was likewise used by Degas in a me vendre aprés les derniéres nouvelles d’Orient [probably the list made in preparation for that exhibition. See Theodore Ref. Balkan crisis]. I] va falloir non seulement donner dans notre The Notebooks of Edgar Degas (Oxford, 1976), 1, 125, notebook liquidation, mais me mettre quelque chose en poche pour passer

26, Pp. 74. Pété. . . . Quelles angoisses j'ai encore souvent et pour ma vie et

2. See John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, qth ed., pour mon art que j'aime tant et qui m/’echappera si le mal revised (New York, 1973), 311 on the closing of Durand-Ruel’s augmente tant soit peu. Infernale aventure!” For a complete

London branch in the winter of 1875. Ronald Pickvance, French transcription see Musée d’Orsay, Degas inédit (Paris, “Degas’s Dancers: 1872-1876,” Burlington Magazine cv (June 1989), 436-37. Also excerpted and translated in Denys Sutton, 1963), 258 n. 20, suggests Durand-Ruel gave up his interest in the Edgar Degas: Life and Work (New York, 1986), 115.

83

Degas and the Business of Art

what about my cotton? Do everything you can to fix a price on it for me, even below what you had said. [need money, I won’t [fuss?] over it any more. And time presses more than ever.” Under the pressing financial circumstances, Degas twice sarcastically referred to the painting he was urgently marketing as “my cotton,” that is, as the cotton commodity it represented. Given his family’s past experiences with the cotton business, and given the current state of the cotton and art

markets, this did not bode well. Degas was ready to accept an “ordinary” price for a “fair to middling” shipment of artistic goods. Even so, his current dealer found no buyer for A Cotton Office, presumably because Deschamps closed his own gallery in London later in 1876.6 Degas must have been frustrated when Deschamps shut down business at exactly the time the artist was begin-

ning to gain some momentum in selling his works in England. After the New Orleans picture arrived in London, presumably in the summer of 1876, it apparently remained on consignment with Deschamps until the spring of 1877. It arrived too late for the twelfth and final exhibition of the Society of French Artists (whose administration Deschamps had taken over from Durand-Ruel); Degas was apparently not aware of the forthcoming closure of Deschamps’s business. That he was disgruntled by the course of events is evident from a letter he wrote to Mme. De Nittis in May 1877, in which he complained about the behavior of Deschamps, from whom he said he had requested the return of A Cotton Office.? One of the possible patrons for the depicted topic among French amateurs of Impressionism,

Monet’s client Ernest Hoschédé, had meanwhile squandered his family’s textile firm, sold his collection of paintings during 1874-78, and faced total bankruptcy in 1877. And Jean Dollfus, director of the large textile center in Alsace and recent convert to the Barbizon school and Impressionism, tended, as an industrialist, to collect the more pre-industrial scenes represented by Sisley, Pissarro, and, most especially, Renoir. (His was a typically nostalgic industrial taste reminiscent of the Manchester cotton “lords.”) During 1876-77, there was a renewed economic depression in France.’ That artists in Degas’s

circle felt the pinch is indicated by a letter of September 1876, from Eugéne Manet to Berthe Morisot: “The entire tribe of painters is in distress. The dealers are overstocked. Edouard [Manet] talks of cutting down expenses and giving up his studio. Let us hope the buyers will return. The present moment, it is true, is unfavorable.”® Needless to say, the dry spell in the art market came at 5. Archives Durand-Ruel, Paris: “Que de temps iJ faut perdre McMullen, Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (Boston, 1984), 259.

hors de ce qui est votre vie, faire de démarches humiliantes, The related letter to Deschamps dated Paris, Vendredi 23 assister 4 d’interminables discussions, que l’on ne comprend (mentioned by Sutton, 116) in which Degas asks his advice about méme pas, pour disputer 4 la faillite son pauvre nom! Je suis donc an English dealer at 55 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury Square,

4 Naples, avec mon frére Achille, pour obtenir de nos créanciers may indicate that the artist was seeking another British dealer de Naples Ia signature d’un concordat qui se traine dupuis six after Deschamps’s gallery closed. For a transcription, see Musée mois. . . . Et puis mon coton? Faites donc tout votre possible d’Orsay (as cited in note 4), 436. According to Pickvance, Degas pour m’en fixer un prix, méme au-dessous de ce que je vous avais showed no more paintings in London until 1882. dit. J’ai besoin d’argent, je ne [fagonne?] plus la-dessus. Et le temps 7. Letter quoted by Mary Pittaluga and Enrico Piceni, De presse plus que jamais.” See Musée d’ Orsay (as cited in preceding Nittis (Milan, 1963), 368-69. The artist De Nittis and his wife note), 437. Also partially excerpted and translated in Sutton (as were acquainted with Deschamps from having spent time in

cited in preceding note). Sutton cites (116) two other undated London. letters to Deschamps in the Archives Durand-Ruel that he thinks 8. See Pierre Léon et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la may refer to A Cotton Office (without mentioning it). This France, m1, L’Avénement de Vére industrielle (1789—années 1880)

connection is questioned by archivist Caroline Durand-Ruel (Paris, 1976), 447-48.

Godfroy (letter of 19 May 1988). 9. Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, 6. Pickvance (as cited in note 2), 258, 266. See also Roy trans. B. W. Hubbard (New York, 1957), 98. 84

The Cotton Office in Pau

the worst possible time for Degas, precisely when René DeGas was reneging on his 40,000-franc cotton debt, leaving his siblings to attempt to cover for him.’ It was in January 1877, that Henri Musson described Edgar Degas as “denying himself everything, living just as cheaply as possible.”"* Degas’s own letters indicate that he turned in 1876—77 to selling his work directly to the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, to whom he wrote in March 1877: “Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money. You cannot imagine the burdens of all kinds which overwhelm me. Tomorrow is the 15th. 1am going to make a small payment and shall have a short respite until the end of the month.”” What is less well known is that Degas also turned, during 1876-77, to exhibiting, marketing, and selling his works in provincial Pau, in the annual salon of the Société des Amis des Arts. It was there, during the moderate economic recovery of 1878, that he succeeded in selling A Cotton Office in New Orleans to the local museum. The sale took place in March, slightly under a month before

René DeGas deserted Estelle Musson in New Orleans," definitively altering the DeGas family’s relations with America and, quite probably, the artist’s attitude toward the picture he had just sold.

I

But why Pau? Are we to assume that, since this was the first museum purchase of a painting by an Impressionist, we are faced, as in the case of an earlier avant-garde painting like Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans (1849-50, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), with an example of ready provincial acceptance of art considered too problematic in the big city?'* Apparently not, because, as we have seen, Degas’s A Cotton Office had neutralized the kind of threatening social messages found in Courbet’s Realist manifesto painting, so as to win a success among some of the more conservative Parisian critics in 1876. The inhabitants of Pau, moreover, were not the potentially volatile provincials of 1850, when hints of a renewal of the Revolution of 1848 were rumored in the French hinterlands among radicals who had fled from the repressed capital. Republican Pau in the 1870s was, on the contrary, doing its utmost to emulate Paris in all its Haussmannized glitter. And, as we shall see, the new art museum in Pau was an integral part of that spectacle. Even so, the meanings the painting acquired for its new audience in Pau were not the same as those it had projected in Paris and New Orleans and were significantly different from those it might have conveyed in Manchester. This disparity was related to distinct changes that had occurred in Pau during the years immediately preceding the purchase of Degas’s painting. The sources that funded the purchase, along with the institutions, individuals, and procedures involved in the selection, were affected by, and indicative of, these changes. Pau was rapidly urbanized during the nineteenth century in a process that transformed it from a small, artisanal town nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees into a renowned international winter

resort. The birthplace of Henri IV, Pau had been, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth 10. Discussed above, Chapter II. fense at his brother’s actions and subsequent divorce from Estelle 11. D-M, box mm, folder 7, as quoted in Chapter II. Musson, see Marilyn R. Brown, “The DeGas-Musson Papers at 12. Marcel Guérin, ed., Degas Letters, trans. Marguerite Kay Tulane University,” Art Bulletin xm (March 1990), 128-29.

(Oxford, 1947), no. 20, pp. 45-46. 14. See T. J. Clark, “A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max 13. René DeGas deserted his wife and child for a New Buchon on Courbet,” Burlington Magazine Cx1 (1969), 208-12, Orleanian neighbor. For family letters relating Edgar Degas’s of- 286-90. See also Armstrong (as cited above in Chapter I, note go).

85

Degas and the Business of Art

centuries, a center for the artisanal manufacture of cotton and linen textiles, which came to be known collectively as linge de Béarn.'5 It was above all the British who, in the aftermath of Wellington’s visit during the Napoleonic Wars, began to flock to Pau during the winter seasons, enjoying its

warm climate and taking its reputedly curative mineral waters. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a shift of emphasis from Pau the provincial outpost for hygienic cures to Pau the elegant center of leisure and tourist industries. Many wealthy visitors stayed to invest in the booming local construction and real estate businesses.!* By the time a railroad link was installed in 1863 (the same year as the founding of the local Société des Amis des Arts), there were some 2,000 winter colonists and about 20,000 local residents. !7 During the 1860s, inspired by the Second Empire’s transformations of Paris, the mayor of Pau solicited private and public investments to commence major renovation and embellishment of the town. The crowning of the urban modernization of Pau occurred subsequently, during the late 1870s, under the administration of the republican mayor Aristide de Monpezat. Monpezat’s administrative account for 1877, for example, reveals expenses of some 900,000 francs on municipal renovations, including 48,000 for lighting, 30,000 for cleaning, 25,000 for paving, 12,000 for sidewalks, 150,000 for sewers, and 20,000 for constructing the rue Tran.'§ Streets and promenades began to be organized in the radiating patterns of Haussmann’s Paris. The Place Royal was connected to the Parc du Chateau by the Boulevard du Midi, and Monpezat brought in the urbanist Adolphe Alphand, who had been Haussmann’s park designer in Paris, to engineer the move of the Mairie to the Place Royale and to oversee the addition of a new public garden there in 1878.!9 The Halles were renovated as a tourist attraction, and various other streets, boulevards, and buildings were expanded. These municipal changes promoted further speculation by foreigners. A noticeable economic boom occurred in 1878, bringing on a fever of speculation in land and construction and attracting 15. See Jean Caput, “L’Evolution géographique d’une petite become a republican senator from the Basses-Pyrénées during capitale régionale: Pau,” Revue Géographique des Pyrénées et du the 1870s. He claimed in 1840 that the urban invasion by a large,

Sud-Ouest Xvill—X1X (1947-48), 139. wealthy, foreign population was fast corrupting what he saw as a 16. See Alfred-Gustave Bellemare, Pau considérée dans ses heretofore intact world of simple rural innocence. He comrapports avec les étrangers (Pau, 1854). This lengthy public relations plained that rents and the standard of living had increased so

tract appealed to wealthy British, American, Spanish, French, much that rigid divisions had grown up between rich and and other tourists who came to Pau, ostensibly for its healthy working-class neighborhoods, a phenomenon he compared to climate, to linger long enough to make investments. Providing Paris, and that the middle class was sacrificing everything to the copious statistics to assure both locals and visitors of revenues exterior dissimulation of elegance. See Marcel Barthe, Album certain to accrue, it complimented the foreigners on the way their Pyrénéen (1840), as quoted by A. Saupiquet, La Ville de Pau aux upmarket presence had generally elevated the social and eco- trois phases de son histoire (Pau, 1949), 154—$6: “We will shiver in

nomic ambience in Pau (not to mention land value), and our luxurious clothes, we will be hungry in splendid rooms, promised that the addition of a railroad connection would bring anxieties will assail us on soft cushions.” Such opinions were

the city’s industrial flowering into full fruition. reversed twenty-five years later in an anonymous letter to the 17. For population statistics see Bellemare (preceding note), inhabitants of Pau written by Emile Garet, a lawyer and 29, 39; André Labarrére, Pau, ville jardin (Paris, 1983), 20; Serge journalist, who was the founder and director of the local Vissiére, Aspects de la vie culturelle @ Pau au XIX‘ siécle republican newspaper L’Indépendant and later deputy and senator. (Bordeaux, 1981), 3. Despite gains in municipal and commercial He extolled the progressive modernization that had transformed revenues, not all local residents were happy about Pau’s growth and refined the city and made it more comfortable. See his Pau en in population and progressive urbanization. Bellemare (36) 1865, Lettre aux habitants de la ville, par un Indigéne (Pau, 1865), as

referred to those who argued that rapid transformations were quoted by Saupiquet, 169. For better or worse, Pau had become turning Pau into “an indolent city, enervated by the enjoyments cosmopolitan and modern. of luxury and satisfied with the tribute brought in each year by 18. Cited by Labarrére (preceding note), 61, rich foreigners.” The most vocal early Cassandra was Marcel 19. Ibid., 63; Pierre Tucoo-Chala et al., Pau, ville anglaise: du Barthe, a Saint-Simonian lawyer and politician who was to Romantisme a la Belle épogque (Pau, 1978), 7-8.

86

The Cotton Office in Pau

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Degas and the Business of Art

Office for the centralized unity of the Rouart portrait, Degas created a further sense of spatial uncertainty in the Clermont portrait by leaning the figure against what appears to be some kind of parapet, from which one of the draped pelts might slip. Although the basic lines of composition recall (in reverse) those of the Fogg version of A Cotton Office, the effect is more unsettling because the viewer’s standpoint is less certainly grounded. With the final painting in the sequence of pictures on the theme of commerce that began with the New Orleans painting, the cryptic message is more ostensibly unflattering and antipathetic. In Portraits, At the Stock Exchange (Fig. 39), the world of the black-suited businessmen who coolly

lounge about the open room of A Cotton Office is transformed, reduced, and presented more abruptly, like the segmentalized spaces glimpsed behind the scenes at the opera ballet or spied through the keyhole of the demimonde.3? Exhibiting none of the heroizing clarity of the Rouart portrait, this all-male scene of calculating fldneurs-financiers has an illicit, clandestine quality. It represented a world the artist knew all too well: the site of the painting, the steps of the Paris Bourse, was exactly where Achille DeGas had brandished his “Americanized” revolver just four years earlier. The picture could easily take as its caption Degas’s previously quoted cynical statement in his Notebooks of 1856: “It’s as if pictures were being painted by stock exchange players, by friction from people avid for profit. ”3: The central figure is the banker Ernest May, a collector, one of the artist’s clients, and a financial backer of the project to publish the journal Le Jour et la Nuit (a commercial venture undertaken in 1879, but never brought to completion, by Degas, along with Cassatt and Pissarro). He is accompa-

nied by a M. Bolatre, to whom he bends a professional ear. In Degas’s depiction of his patron’s Semitic facial features,34 as well as throughout the composition, including the marginal figures on the left, there is a quality of caricature that lends a cynical sense of social attack.35 There is, in fact, a striking resemblance between Degas’s painting and an apparent source, Daumier’s lithograph Robert Macaire Boursier (Fig. 40), which had been published on 26 February 1837 in Le Charivari.3° A great admirer of Daumier, Degas frequently did sketches after the caricaturist’s lithographs and learned much from his compositional and physiognomic example.37 In this case, though, Degas seems to have drawn as much on Daumier’s idea as on his form. Robert Macaire and his sidekick Bertrand appeared as charlatans and pickpockets throughout the series Daumier had begun in 1836. Adopting various disguises, Macaire was a swindler cast from the same mold as Balzac’s Vautrin, a con man who beat the bourgeois at his own game, or, as Champfleury put it, a raven perched on the Bourse. In this instance the conniving Macaire has donned suit and top hat to engage in what appears to be a nineteenth-century form of insider trading. 32. See the excellent discussion of this picture in Armstrong from the “openness of professional engagement” of A Cotton

(as cited in note I), 36-37. Office in New Orleans. See her “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A 33. Surely Degas was being ironic or sarcastic when he Portrait of the Artist as Anti-Semite,” in Norman L. Kleeblatt, reportedly said of bankers and boursiers: “Les voila, nos héros ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (Berkeley and Los

d’aujourd’hui.” Quoted in Sevin (cited in note 7), 25. Angeles, 1987), 96-115, especially 99-101. 34. In a letter to Félix Bracquemond, Degas referred to May 35. See Herbert (as cited in note I), §5—§6. as “a Jew” who was “throwing himself into the arts.” Letters (as 36. Cf. the closely related lithograph of Macaire, Vous étes cited in note 3), no. 28, pp. 51-52. Linda Nochlin reads the banquier, monsieur? published in Le Charivari, 9 July 1838: Loys “Jewishness” of this unflattering portrait, along with the Delteil, Le Peintre-Graveur Illustré, xx1, Honoré Daumier, 1 (Paris,

“Semitic nose” of one of the marginal figures on the left as 1925), no. 440. supporting “a whole mythology of Jewish financial conspiracy.” 37. See Reff, Degas (as cited in note 24), chapter 2. She sees the “vulgar familiarity” of the portrait as quite distinct

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Degas and the Business of Art

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[The conspiratorial flavor is avidly appropriated by Degas, but to rather different ends. Although the central protagonist is more detached, there is a nasty, if subtle, suggestion of antiSemitism in the depiction of May’s physiognomic traits in spite of Degas’s being on good terms at the time with other Jewish acquaintances and friends, including Hecht, Halévy, and Pissarro.3* The prominent visual pun in which May’s effaced right hand can be read in a proto-cinematic way as double-dealing, that is, as either holding the note being handed to him or as merging with the blurred hands clasped behind the cropped, overlapping figure who strides abruptly in front of him, meanwhile provides a cunning visual elision in which literal artistic legerdemain may be read as other kinds. In this case, though, Degas’s critique of business and of his patron seems to have been

inflected (several years before the Dreyfus affair, when the artist adopted a vehement anti38. Pissarro, himself a Jew and an anari hist. likewise (and schild, d'un Gould, quelconque.” Quoted by Ralph E. Shikes, astoundingly) adopted distinctively Semitic facial features for a “Pissarro’s Political Philosophy and His Art,” in Christopher caricatural and allegorical figure of voracious Capital, drawn as a Llovd. ed.. Studies on Camille Pissarro (London and New York, part of his Turpitudes Sociales series in 1889. On this series, see 1986), 47. According to Shikes, Pissarro’s hostility to Jewish Richard Thomson, “Camille Pissarro, Tirpitudes Sociales, and the bankers was an attitude motivated by class and politics: “that of Universal Exhibition of 1889,” Arts Magazine 56 (April 1982), the radical, artistic Jew towards the wealthy Jews involved in 82-88. On the Semitic features of Capital, see Nochlin (as « ited in banks and speculation rather than in what he regarded as creative note 34). In a letter explaining the series to his mieces, Alice and endeavor.” Unlike Degas, Pissarro went on to be staunchly proEsther Isaacson, Pissarro referred to his drawing of Capital as “le Dreyfus, although he continued to criticize Jewish banks, even in

portrait d’un Bischoftheim ou d’un Oppenheim, d’un Roth- 1898

[30

An Entrepreneur in Spite of Himself

Dreyfusard stance) by a perceptible anti-Semitism, which, in turn, has the effect of complicating and vitiating Daumier’s class-directed humor. The fact that Ernest May proceeded to purchase the picture from Degas, without evidently having been offended by it, brings to mind the unfazed acceptance by the Spanish royal family at the beginning of the nineteenth century of Goya’s unstintingly uncomplimentary portraits of them. With this ambivalent painting Degas left behind the explicit subject matter of the male business world. But by this time he was exploring the implicit extension of its protagonists, power, and commercial ideology into the demimonde. That he identified this phenomenon with his close acquaintances is confirmed by a painting he showed in 1879, in the same Impressionist exhibition as the Stock Exchange, the compositionally related Halévy and Cavé Backstage at the Opera (1878-79, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which was in turn reminiscent of the Fogg version of A Cotton Office. The cropped, disjunctive interchanges between top-hatted, black-suited men (in this specific instance, entrepreneurs of the theater) were transferred more definitively behind the scenes to mingle with cornered, ogled dancers in the Cardinal Family monotypes (1876—83; Fig. 41) and related works.?39 In the formally related brothel monotypes, the stealthily observed exchanges often became murky and ugly as sex was reduced to commerce and vice versa (Fig. 42; c. 1879-80). Degas apparently viewed the sex industry, with its efficient and profitable sale of services, as exemplary of modern capitalism. Although the commodity being marketed here was clearly not cotton, the contradictions implicit in Degas’s attitudes toward business as a masculine domain were likewise present in his representations of these “businesswomen,”4° and were further complicated by issues of gender. The line between producer and marketer often becomes blurred in these scenes, as does the line between labor and the business of “leisure.” And whereas Degas’s depictions of individuals in the public arena of the male business world were intended for exhibition or sale, the brothel images of social types were, for the most part, kept by the artist for private delectation and for the pleasure of a few close friends.+! Some of the views of prostitutes exclude men, except as assumed viewers, and concentrate

instead on the women’s fatigue, their intimate relations with one another (often involving autoeroticism), or on their social relations with their female manager or “madam.” One of the latter scenes, entitled The Madam’s Birthday (c. 1879-80; Fig. 43), looks unflinchingly at the commercial realities of the maison close. The deadpan yet dominant madam is physically and economically

linked to the cropped torso on the right, which, stripped of clothes and individuality, becomes an emblem of the sexual commodity being proftfered.43 As several recent studies have argued, Degas’s 39. See Eugenia Parry Janis, Degas Monotypes: Essay, Catalogue cle of commodity tetishism.” See Hollis Clayson, Painted Love:

& Checklist (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), nos. 195-231. These Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven, prints were done as a project (eventually abandoned) to illustrate Conn., 1991), 40, 42 on Degas’s brothel scenes as representations

a new edition of a volume of stories called La Famille Cardinal of a relatively old-fashioned form of commerce in which

(1880) by Ludovic Halévy. personhood is cancelled by sexual exchange. For the history of 40. Linda Nochlin, “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction prostitution at this ume see Alain Corbin, Les Filles de Noce: of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting,” in her Women, Misére sexuelle et prostitution (19° et 20° siécles) (Paris, 1978); idem, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York, 1988), 43-44, draws Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France After 1850,

a general analogy between the commercial activity in Degas’s trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1990): and Jill Harsin, scenes of businessmen and that of his prostitute scenes. Also see Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1985). T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet 41. A few may have been exhibited in April 1877. See Grand and His Followers (New York, 1985), chapter 2, for an interpreta- Palais (as cited in note 17), 296.

tion of prostitutes as potent symbols of the equivocal truth of 42. See Janis (as cited in note 39), nos. 58-118; 184-85. financial exchange. According to Charles Bernheimer, Figures of 43. Here I concur with the interpretation given by Richard Tl Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France Thomson, Degas: The Nudes (London, 1988), 115. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 93, prostitutes embodied “the specta-

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