Café au lait, beignets, pralines — the New Orleans French Market has always been a must stop for tourists visiting the city. Looking back, however, the market today is nothing like it was in the 19th century when grocers, merchants, butchers and fish mongers of all ethnic and racial groups sold their goods to locals. The old French Market certainly made an impression on famed American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted during his 1853 travels across the “Seaboard Slave States.”
“In the crowded market-place,” he wrote with his usual critical eye and pen, “there were not only pure old Indian Americans, and the Spanish, French, English, Celtic, and African, but nearly all possible mixed varieties of these…”
The market hadn’t changed much by 1871 when this image by Alfred R. Waud appeared in the July 15, 1871, issue of Harper’s Weekly. According to Waud’s notes on his original drawing, the Choctaw women sitting to the right are making mosquito netting and the Choctaws to the left are selling herbs or sassafras used to make filé, as in filé gumbo.
One notable artist found all of this fascinating. In the fall and spring of 1872 and 1873, French Impressionist Edgar Degas visited New Orleans for a five-month stay with his American relatives. His mother, Marie Celeste Musson Degas, was a native-born New Orleanian and a member of the prosperous Louisiana French Creole Musson family. During his daily walks and rides through the French Quarter and French Market, the 38-year-old Degas was struck by the visual wonders he saw all around him. Historian Christopher Benfey describes that visit in his 1997 book “Degas in New Orleans.”
“Everything attracts me here,” Degas wrote to a friend in Paris. “I look at everything. . . I am accumulating plans which would take 10 lifetimes to carry out.”
In another letter to French Impressionist Henri Rouart, Degas described New Orleans as an exotic city filled with “beautiful, refined Indian women behind their half-opened green shutters, and the old women with their big bandanna kerchiefs going to market.”
Years later, when Paul Gauguin was looking for an exotic place to paint, Degas suggested New Orleans. Instead, Gauguin chose Tahiti. “He decided that (New Orleans) was too civilized,” Degas remarked.
Despite his fascination with the French Quarter and market, the outside light was too intense for his failing vision. Instead, he spent much of his time indoors sketching family members, including a portrait of his almost blind cousin and sister-in-law Estelle. That portrait is now at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Unquestionably, the most famous painting he did while here was “A Cotton Office in New Orleans” that depicted his two brothers and uncle, that hangs in the Musée des beaux-arts de Pau, France.
Degas left the city in March 1873 never to return. His New Orleans paintings and drawings were found in his Paris studio after his death in 1917.
