April 7, 2022 19unrealistic expectations of financial suc-
cess. He was attentive to the careers of
more fashionable realists such as Tissot
and Alfred Stevens, noting with some
envy that the former earned the equiva-
lent of 95,000 francs in 1872. Extending
his stay in New Orleans so that he could
complete A Cotton Office in New Or-
leans—one of his early masterpieces—
he boasted to Tissot in February 1873
that the English dealers Thomas Agnew
and Sons, with whom he had no asso-
ciation whatever, would be able to find
wealthy cotton- mill owners in Manches-
ter for such pictures. Degas’s expecta-
tion that they might command Tissot’s
prices of £900 —the equivalent of 22,
francs—is so unrealistic as to appear
slightly unhinged.^3 Five years later,
thanks to his friendship with prominent
figures in the community, A Cotton Of-
fice in New Orleans was acquired by
the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Pau for
2,000 francs: a considerable reduction
from Degas’s asking price of 5,
francs. Thanking the curator in March
1878, Degas wrote, “I must confess that
this is the first time that a Museum hon-
ors me in this way, and that such of ficial
recognition both surprises and flatters
me to a considerable degree.”Degas referred to the paintings and
pastels he made for the market—dis-
tinctly signed, sometimes dated—as his
“articles,” a term he first used in May- For one reminded since youth
of the “need to earn one’s bread and
butter in this world,” he was always
attentive to commercial networks and
possibilities, but he approached his
more ambitious projects—scenes of
what Édouard Manet had termed Pari-
sian “high life”—somewhat differently.
With such paintings, his treatment of
collectors and patrons could be will-
ful, at times self- destructive. A case in
point was Jean- Baptiste Faure, the cel-
ebrated baritone and early enthusiast
of Manet and the Impressionists, who
in 1874 commissioned five new works
from Degas and entered into a compli-
cated arrangement with Durand- Ruel,
whereby a certain number of Degas’s
paintings were returned to the artist so
that he could rework them. Of the new
commissions, only two were delivered
to Faure in 1875–1876. In July 1886
Degas was still requesting time to fin-
ish “your large horse races” (The Race
Tra c k , Amateur Jockeys Near a Car-
riage, 1887), pleading, “Just give me a
few days more and you’ll receive satis-
faction.” Finally losing patience, in May
1887 Faure sued Degas in civil court,
which found in Faure’s favor and held
the artist responsible for legal costs. The
three remaining canvases were com-
pleted well before the end of the year.^4
Henri Rouart was rumored to have
kept Degas’s Dancers Practicing at the
Barre (1877) secured to the wall to pre-
vent him from taking it back to his ate-
lier to retouch it. The young Leo Stein
asked the collector if the story was true:
“He said the padlock was a fiction but
that he kept his eye on Degas when
Degas left the house after his customary
dinner on Thursday, even though the
picture was a little large to be hidden
under the painter’s cape.” In Decem-
ber 1897 Joseph Durand- Ruel—more
trusting than his father, perhaps—al-
lowed Degas to take back the portrait
of Viscount Ludovic- Napoléon Lepic
and his daughters, the celebrated Place
de la Concorde (1875), which the dealer
had acquired at an auction of Lepic’s
collection in March 1897, in order to add
some finishing touches. Degas held on to
the painting until October 1904—caus-
ing a sale to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin
to fall through—and it was finally ac-
quired in December 1911 by the Berlin
insurance magnate Otto Gerstenberg.
Long believed to have been destroyed by
fire during World War II, it made a spec-
tacular reappearance in 1995 as one of
many Impressionist masterpieces looted
by the Soviet army from German collec-
tions in 1945 and is today still in the State
Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
In the 1890s, the most fully docu-
mented decade in Reff’s Letters, Degas
appears as a reluctant but honorable
paterfamilias, responsible for the well-
being of a far- flung and somewhat dis-
appointing family (his siblings and their
children lived in Buenos Aires, Naples,
and Geneva). Between 1874 and 1882
he had served as the chief creditor for
his impulsive brother Achille, who had
defaulted on a loan of 66,000 francs to
shore up the failing family bank.^5 From
1892 on, Degas gave his sister Thérèse
a monthly allowance, a sum that in-
creased after her husband’s death in De-
cember 1894. Beginning in 1893, Degas
was also paying a quarterly stipend to
one of his oldest and dearest friends,
the painter Évariste de Valernes, a
teacher at the municipal art school in
Carpentras. Not inclined to marry—
although apparently “haunted” by the
desire to do so in October 1890, and
flirting in public in 1898–1899 with
Renoir’s pupil Jeanne Baudot^6 —Degas(^3) As Reff notes, Degas may have
learned about the collection of modern
paintings formed by the Manchester
industrialist William Cottrill—whom
the painter called “Cottrell”—from il-
lustrated articles in the Art Journal in
1870 –1871.
(^4) Reff discovered the legal documents
and published them in “Degas in
Court,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol.
153, No. 1,298 (May 2011), an article
not cited in the bibliography of Reff’s
edition of the letters. As Reff noted, it
was Degas’s restless perfectionism, his
“imperative need to innovate, to exper-
iment, to find new solutions to prob-
lems of composition, expression and
execution that seems to have driven
him to rework Faure’s pictures.”
(^5) Reff, “Degas in Court,” pp. 318–322.
(^6) In October 1890 Pierre-Georges Jean-
niot reported to Degas’s good friend
Paul Lafond in Pau, “Je crois Degas
hanté d’idées de mariage, ceci entre
nous.” Denys Sutton and Jean Adhémar,
“Lettres inédites de Degas à Paul La-
fond et autres documents,” Gazette
des Beaux- Arts, April 1987, p. 166. For
Degas’s infatuation with the twenty-
two- year- old Baudot (“Si j’épousais
Mamzelle Baudot!...ce serait un drôle
de mariage”) and Julie Manet’s encour-
agement of it, see Julie Manet, Journal,
1893–1899: Sa jeunesse parmi les pein-
tres impressionnistes et les hommes de
lettres (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1979), pp.
202, 206, and 213. In December 1894
Edmond de Goncourt told a malicious
story about Degas and the naturalist,
novelist, and playwright Léon Hennique
having shared two sisters as their mis-
tresses, with Hennique’s “belle soeur en
détrempe” complaining of “des moyens
amoureux de Degas.” Edmond de Gon-
court, Journal: Mémoires de la vie lit-
téraire, edited by Robert Riccatte (Paris:
R. Laffont, 1989), volume 3, p. 1,040.
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