When King Cotton ruled the world
Cotton was the most important commodity of the 19th century. Yet very few artists took an interest in it. One who did was Edgar Degas. His painting of a cotton office in New Orleans is a truly spectacular work.
Barbara Basting
Barbara Basting worked as a cultural editor and currently heads the visual arts division in the City of Zurich’s Culture Department.
Raw cotton was considered ‘white gold’, overtaking previously dominant natural fibres such as linen and wool after the industrial methods to process it were invented in England in the 19th century. The foundations for this had already been laid with the trade in Indiennes, a triangular commercial arrangement, whereby Europeans sold the long unrivalled Indian cotton fabrics in Africa, where they were used as currency to exchange for slaves for the Transatlantic slave trade. Because without these slaves, the huge increase in cotton production in America would not have been possible.
Meanwhile, industrialisation led to the development of an industrial proletariat in Europe. And cotton trading and processing gave rise to global trading empires and huge fortunes. One of the best-known examples is the Volkart (later Reinhart) company founded in 1851 in Winterthur, which was the world’s fourth largest cotton trader until it closed in 1999.
Here, Degas also places himself in the limelight: as an artist who wants to entice the onlooker with a captivating cloud-like surface in iridescent white tones. No other area of the painting is depicted with such palpable textural detail. A second, much more concentrated version of the painting (Cotton Merchants in New Orleans) produced shortly afterwards confirms Degas’s interest in cotton as a motif. In this second version, he dispenses almost entirely with the narrative dimension, moving towards the painterly abstraction of modernism.
Degas’s scene also presents us with a number of mysteries. Who is this man? A discerning customer or the company owner? The man with the moustache deep in concentration at the standing desk is probably the bookkeeper. But what about the two dandies who lend the scene a coffee house atmosphere? One is a peripheral figure, leaning back against the window frame on the left, looking bored. The figure lazing about reading a newspaper with a cigarette in his mouth sits in the centre of the picture and also on the diagonal line that goes back from the cotton inspector towards a fleeting glimpse of a seascape featuring a ship. This is no coincidence for an artist like Degas. Because the painting within the painting is by no means just an innocuous prop. Ships transported the raw material from the areas where they were grown to the production facilities. And ships carried the slaves who had made possible the boom in the cotton trade in the US in the early 19th century, for which New Orleans was a hub. Another telling detail is the waste paper basket in the foreground that appears to be almost spilling out over the edge of the painting.
The real key to understanding the work, however, is the year it was painted: 1873. On 1 February of that year, the cotton trading company Musson, Livaudais, Prestidge & Co. filed for bankruptcy – in the very newspaper that René Degas is reading. Edgar Degas, who accompanied his brother René to New Orleans to escape the political turbulence in France, produced portraits of a number of family members during his stay. Even the Cotton Office is a family picture. And what a family picture it is! Degas managed to capture the dramatic moment when the family went bankrupt.
The underlying reason behind the downfall of the company Musson, Livaudais, Prestidge & Co., however, was an outdated business model. The advent of the railways and telegraphs changed the conditions for the speculative forward transactions which had made Michel Musson very rich. Those who wanted to remain successful had to keep pace with the new transport and communication infrastructure, as well as the latest financing models. Edgar Degas clearly captures this by depicting his brother René with a newspaper, an outdated information medium for his purposes. As it happens, René had sealed the Musson company’s fate through bad speculation. Because of the family’s intricate financial ties, the bankruptcy also ruined Edgar Degas and his father Auguste, a banker from Naples based in Paris.
Germain Musson’s son Michel and, after a while, Edgar’s brother René joined the trading company, which was initially a thriving venture. But after the American Civil War, the family found itself on the losing side, not only commercially but also politically. Michel Musson, who had personally owned several slaves, even exchanged a property from his father’s estate for Confederate bonds at the expense of his nephew Edgar. A proper fiasco.
At this point, it’s worth casting a sideways glance at the Volkart company, which was operating at the same time. While the Degas family firm in New Orleans collapsed as a result of the tectonic shifts in the cotton business, the company in Winterthur was better able to weather the turbulent times, probably also on account of its links to England. Volkart therefore initially expanded to India. It only set up a permanent office in the US in the 1880s, which ultimately allowed it to play a key part in the renewed boom in the American cotton business after the First World War.
Art to earn a living
Yet Cottrill had also been caught out by the American cotton crisis and was in the process of selling off his art collection. Regardless of that, he was not interested in a picture of a washed-up colleague in the United States. In any case, he failed to appreciate Degas’s imagery.
