Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
Louisiana Story
By Roger Shattuck
Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable
by Christopher Benfey
Knopf, 294 pp., $27.50
Masters and Servants
by Pierre Michon, translated by Wyatt Alexander Mason
Mercury House, 176 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Edgar Degas, the Impressionist painter of racehorses, ballet dancers, and washerwomen, was the opposite of precocious. It is true that the official Salon jury accepted some of his early paintings. Copying had taught him his craft. But not until he turned thirty did he leave home, give up historical subjects and self-portraits, and begin painting the Second Empire world around him-usually with a model in his studio, not in the open air. He also began to frequent Right Bank cafes and had lengthy conversations about painting with Manet, Monet, and a group of art critics. His embrace of the new 'realism' was interrupted by military service during the Franco-Prussian War and by the massacres of the Commune. Then, just when he seemed to be finding his style in vivid small paintings of musicians and dancers, he left Paris in October 1872 to visit his relatives in New Orleans. He was thirty-eight.
Review, 3475 words
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