**An eye for economic themes: painter Edgar Degas photographed in 1895.** Wikimedia / Harvard Art Museums

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.

In the 19th century, cotton was a key driver of industrialisation. Already grown and manufactured by humans for millennia, particularly in India and East Asia, but also in Italy and southern Germany from the 12th century through imports via Venice, it became a crucial ‘accelerator’ of industrialisation. More recent historical studies even go so far as to call it “a key to understanding the modern world, the great inequalities that characterise it, the long history of globalisation and the ever-changing political economy of capitalism.” At least this is the theory put forward by historian Sven Beckert in his fascinating book Empire of Cotton – A New History of Global Capitalism. 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.

Volkart subsidiary in Karachi, photographed in 1903. — *Volkart* subsidiary in Karachi, photographed in 1903. Stadtarchiv Winterthur, Firmenarchiv Gebr. Volkart, Dep 42/1695.6

Despite cotton’s huge importance, it was largely ignored by artists. One striking exception is A Cotton Office in New Orleans, painted by French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917) during his stay there in 1873. Soon afterwards, Degas made a name for himself as an Impressionist, particularly thanks to his paintings of ballet dancers. In terms of his artistic and personal development the Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) marked a turning point in several respects. The artist, whose earlier work had been guided by the outdated ideal of history paintings and by neoclassical role models such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with mixed success, wanted to relaunch his career with this work. In the painting he also shows us his reasons for doing so.

**Degas’s 1873 painting is more personal than it may seem at first glance.** Wikimedia / Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

We are given a glimpse into a late 19th century commercial office, from which a visibly well-off group of white men working for King Cotton participates in international trade and financial flows. Through this milieu study of the workplace – which completely omits the many black people in New Orleans, although they would likely have featured in such a scene, at least as assistants or porters – Degas seems to be drawing on historical examples such as Rembrandt’s The Sampling Officials.

Rembrandt’s Sampling Officials of 1662. — **Rembrandt’s *Sampling Officials* of 1662.** Wikimedia / Rijksmuseum

Yet the subjects of the two paintings are worlds and centuries apart: the Dutch drapers looking confidently out at us and the world, and the strangely self-absorbed goings-on of the cotton merchants in the United States. Degas presents the figures on a peep-show stage with an extreme wide-angle perspective, like scattered examples of an exotic species. The centre of the action – cotton – is shown in the form of a spread-out bale as two men inspect the fleece. 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.

Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, 1873. — *Cotton Merchants in New Orleans*, 1873. Wikimedia / Harvard Art Museums

The Cotton Office also illustrates Degas’s ability to portray psychological states. For example, the dignified man wearing a top hat in the foreground, who is also inspecting a tuft of cotton, is depicted as a thin-lipped connoisseur with the double chin of a bon viveur. 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.

To solve the mysteries: the painting depicts the cotton office in New Orleans belonging to Degas’s uncle Michel Musson. The cotton inspector in the foreground is Michel Musson himself, and the man at the standing desk is his associate, John E. Livaudais. Meanwhile, the two dandies are Degas’s brothers, Achille and René. 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.

**Achille Degas, painted by his brother, 1864.** Wikimedia

**Portrait of René Degas, drawn by brother Edgar, 1861-62.** Wikimedia / MFA Boston

The bankruptcy had a number of causes. First of all, the American Civil War in 1862 and its aftermath led to massive upheaval in the already globally-interconnected cotton trade. The abolition of slavery in the southern states of the US meant that the country was no longer able to produce cotton on the scale it had before. On top of that, the stock market crash of 1873 sent shock waves through the financial markets. 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.

**The rapid expansion of railways in the United States changed how business was done. Not everyone was able to keep pace. First train travelling between Houston and New Orleans from the 1880s.** Library of Congress

A significant share of the family assets had come from Degas’s mother, Célestine Musson (Michel Musson’s sister). Célestine’s father, Frenchman Germain Musson, had built the family wealth in Haiti through the cotton and silver trade, before moving to New Orleans in Louisiana – which had just been sold to the United States – following the uprisings in Haiti in 1804. 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

The family bankruptcy was an existential blow for Degas, who had previously been well-off. Suddenly, he had to make a living from his art. With the Cotton Office, he wanted to take a strategically smart approach. Degas described his painting to his fellow artist James Tissot as ‘mon cotton’, his cotton, in other words his capital. He had his sights set on a potential buyer: English art collector William Cottrill. Cottrill, who owned a spinning mill in Manchester, was also involved in the cotton business. 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.

Degas presented his Cotton Office to a wider audience for the first time at the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1876. Despite the good response, he failed to find a buyer there either. Slightly desperate by now, Degas sent his painting to a salon at the newly-founded Pau Museum of Fine Art in 1878, where it was bought. The first impressionist work to be acquired by a museum went for a knock-down price. And it went hand-in-hand with the development of tourism as a new, upcoming economic sector for which art would soon become essential. Because as a summer resort in south west France, Pau wanted to offer something special to wealthy English and American tourists. A scene from New Orleans seemed ideal, especially as some of visitors had made their fortunes from the textile industry.

**The town of Pau, depicted on a lithograph by Pierre Grose, wanted to attract British and American tourists. This was also why the local art museum acquired Degas’s painting.** Wikimedia

Following his bad experiences with the Cotton Office, Degas discovered very different milieus for his painting: those of ballet dancers and laundresses, with which he eventually found fame. One of his dancer paintings even ended up in the Impressionism collection of one of the heirs of the Volkart cotton dynasty in Winterthur: Oskar Reinhart, who stepped down as chief executive of the company in 1918 to focus on his collecting activity, acquired it in 1923. Following Degas’s death in 1917, Reinhart was interested in works from Degas’s art collection, but didn’t get a chance to acquire any. Besides, he only gradually warmed to Degas’s works and was generally more interested in his portraits than his dancers. Perhaps he could have done something with the Cotton Office. But by then it had reached the status of a modern history painting and was unattainable for collectors.

More of: Modern Age Economy Colonialism Art

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