Early in October 1872 ... Renee and Edgar Degas left Paris and arrived in London from which were to have sailed to America. They visited the gallery of Durand-Ruelle on New Bond Street. The more considered the British Degas painting, was the more confident in my assumptions, that the French painters soon will occupy a leading place in the history of painting, it is the opinion of his friends with him did not share, excluding a Pissarro.
A month later, the brothers arrived in Liverpool, where the sea off in New York, on his way to New Orleans. Degas was under the impression of sleeping cabins steamboat :.".. wonderful invention .. You can sleep in a normal bed, you can even put their shoes outside the door that they cleaned .. "
November 11 brothers arrived in New Orleans, where they were met by numerous relatives. Family Degas took an enormous house on Esplanade Avenue, owned a plantation and was well provided
Later, Degas told artdileru Ambroizu Vollard story about Fontelle, blacks with a family plantation.
"This switch was dissatisfied with his name and once claimed as the abolition of slavery, the" Monsieur "Fontell went straight to the city, where ordered vizitnyye cards:
Charles Brutus,
color free man.
Then this free man ran ran to the estate, to have time for dinner to serve his Lord "
Degas lived in the house of his brother, soon began to paint portraits of each family member, but found it difficult, no one seriously did not belong to his work, the children ran, jumped, and just quietly he could paint a portrait of his brother's wife Renee, Estelle, she was blind.
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Degas in Louisiana is considering ".. villas of different styles. Painted in white, magnolia, orange and banana trees, the Negroes in their national dress and white children in their black hands .. brilliant light came into my eyes"
He looked Orleans women and acknowledged that they have charm, and slavery did not spoil their izyaschestva.
The beauty of black people had a profound effect on Degas, he wrote in his letter Tiso: "The World of Black - a gift of color, but I do not have time for this study. I want to go to Paris"
But the world of blacks still influenced his work: those muscular legs ballet dancers, laundresses hands against the backdrop of flickering gas lamps, gray-white walls
Degas decided to return to Paris in January, but suddenly he had a new idea to go to New Orleans cotton mill to write some stories. He was familiar with the rich spinners from England, which has an art gallery in Manchester, and he thought that the latter may be interested in this painting from nature. Three months later he wrote to working versions of the picture and in the spring of 1973 he returned to Paris with their "laundresses.
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