Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable

Edgar Degas's starkly realistic painting of a cotton-broker's office in New Orleans is one of his best-known works not dealing with ballet dancers or horses. It was painted in 1872 in New Orleans--his mother's birthplace--before he settled on the impressionist style and subject matter that would make him famous. The artist lived for five months with relatives in a once grand house at the edge of the French Quarter. Benfey, a professor of American literature at Mount Holyoke, sees the painting as a turning point in the French artist's career. Benfey does not so much tell how Degas spent his time in New Orleans as create a feeling for what life was like in the city during the 1870s, with New Orleans ""French"" pitted against New Orleans ""Americans,"" both of whom were battling the carpetbaggers from the North. The result is an imaginative social history enriched with insights drawn from the novels and short stories of Cable and Chopin, New Orleans writers of the 1870s whom Degas did not know. The illusion of the city's racial divisions is one theme of the work; Benfey reports that his book ""is the first to reveal the intimate and hitherto unsuspected connections between the black and white branches of [his mother's] family."" More about the artist himself would have been appreciated, but the informed glimpse we get of his New Orleans family is richly drawn. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)