Volume 46, Number 12 · July 15, 1999
Degas in New Orleans
By James Fenton
Degas and New Orleans: A French Impressionist in America
an exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, May 1-August 29, 1999., Catalog of the exhibition by Gail Feigenbaum, by Jean Sutherland Boggs
New Orleans Museum of Art, 301 pp., $25.95 (paper)
'I have just had and still have a spot of weakness and trouble in my eyes,' wrote Degas to his then friend, the painter James Tissot. 'It caught me at Chateau by the edge of the water in full sunlight while I was doing a watercolour and it made me lose nearly three weeks, being unable to read or work or go out much, trembling all the time lest Ishould remain like that.' The year was 1871. Degas was thirty-seven, and he seems to have dated his affliction from this period, since he later told Walter Sickert (among others) that 'during the siege of Paris, he had slept in a studio with a high window from which the cold air poured down on his face at night.'
Review, 2209 words
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