Where Degas Painted His New Orleans Family

In October 1872 Edgar Degas arrived in New Orleans to stay with his mother's family, the Mussons, cotton merchants who had given up their Garden District mansion and were renting a house on Esplanade Avenue. He stayed until March 1873. Here he painted his relatives, among them Estelle Musson Balfour, his cousin and the wife of his brother René, and he stood godfather to her newborn at Christmas. The visit was not all ease. The crowded household wore on his nerves, and four of the young nieces and cousins he painted would later die of scarlet fever or yellow fever. He also began A Cotton Office in New Orleans, a scene inside his uncle Michel Musson's firm, which became the first of his paintings bought by a museum. The house at 2306 Esplanade is now a museum and inn, and the only Degas home or studio open to the public.