Detail of the Sketch of a Courtyard of a House in New Orleans by Degas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: Courtyard of a House (New Orleans, sketch)

Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)

Date: 1873

Geography: Country of Origin France

Culture: French

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 23 5/8 × 28 15/16 in. (60 × 73.5 cm)
Framed: 34 5/8 × 40 1/4 × 4 3/4 in. (88 × 102.3 × 12 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen (238 WH)

Accession Number: MD.012


Degas began this view from his family’s house soon after he arrived in New Orleans. Apart from the two cotton-office scenes, shown nearby, it is his only painting placed in a recognizably New Orleans setting. Notably, it is also his only visual record from that city of a Black figure, shown here as a nanny, despite the many Black people he observed and mentioned in letters. First shown in 1876, at the second Impressionist exhibition, this “sketch,” as it was called, went totally unnoticed by the critics, who focused their attention on Degas’s Cotton Office and his painting of a laundress with bare arms.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/844683