Degas House

This guide to Degas House in New Orleans follows Edgar Degas during a five-month stay in 1872 and 1873 with his mother's family on Esplanade Avenue, a visit he told almost no one was complicated by failing eyesight he had quietly discovered two years earlier. It traces his portrait of his cousin and sister-in-law Estelle, herself nearly blind, and the choice he made in how to pose a woman who could not see him back. Down the hall, in what is now the front parlor, he painted the picture that made his name, a scene of his uncle's cotton office already sliding toward collapse. Stand in this hallway and consider what a nearly blind painter was really looking for.