Edgar Degas
New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Edgar Degas House. This house was bequeathed to the artist and his sister by their maternal uncle Michael Musson. The property was at one time held by Wm. Kenner. Kenner was in New Orleans to assist Wm.C.C. Claiborne in the transfer of New Orleans and Louisiana purchase from French to American Rule. Degas sold the house in 1866. Designated a National Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 1978.
The Story
The French Impressionist Edgar Degas had deep New Orleans roots through his mother's Creole family, the Mussons, and this house connects him to that heritage. The property passed through prominent local hands, including a figure tied to the 1803 transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States. Degas's ownership ended when the house was sold in 1866, and it was later honored as a National Landmark in 1978.
Why it matters
The house is one of the few surviving links between a major European painter and 19th-century New Orleans, joining the city's Creole society to the history of Western art.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This New Orleans house bridges two eras named on the marker — the early republic and the Gilded Age — and its story runs through both. Its threads reach back to the very beginning of American New Orleans, and forward to the 1860s, when a French painter with deep local family roots came to stay.
New Orleans has always been a crossroads city, French and Spanish before it was American, and shaped by the Creole society that grew up there. The marker's mention of the transfer of "New Orleans and Louisiana" from French to American rule points to the pivotal moment of 1803, when the vast Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the young United States and folded this uniquely European city into the American nation.
By the time the painter appears in the story, decades later, the city had its own distinctive world of Creole families, French speech, and cultural ties that still reached across the Atlantic. It was into that world — his mother's world — that Edgar Degas came, and this house was his family's link to it.
People & events
The marker traces the house through the hands that held it. It was bequeathed to Edgar Degas and his sister by their maternal uncle, Michael Musson — a reminder that the great French Impressionist was tied to New Orleans through his mother's family. For an artist we think of as thoroughly Parisian, that American Creole inheritance is a surprising and human detail.
Before the Mussons, the property had been held by William Kenner, and here the marker reaches back to 1803. Kenner, it tells us, was in New Orleans to help William C. C. Claiborne with the transfer of the city and the Louisiana Purchase from French to American rule. Claiborne was the official who presided over that handover and went on to govern the new territory — so the ground beneath this house touches the moment Louisiana became American.
Degas's own connection came to a close in 1866, when, as the inscription records, he sold the house. His time with the property was brief, but the link was real, and more than a century later, in 1978, the Department of the Interior recognized the site's importance by designating it a National Landmark.
Its place in the American story
The house is one of the rare places where the history of European art and the history of an American city physically overlap. A major figure of French Impressionism had genuine family ties to New Orleans, and this property is the tangible evidence of it — a bridge between a Parisian studio and a Creole household on the Gulf.
It also gathers up threads of the larger American story. Through William Kenner and Claiborne, it connects to the Louisiana Purchase, one of the defining events in the nation's expansion. Through the Musson family, it connects to the Creole society that made New Orleans unlike any other American city. And through Degas, it connects to the wider currents of Atlantic culture that flowed back and forth between America and Europe.
The 1978 National Landmark designation confirms that this is more than local lore. Federal recognition marks the site as significant to the whole country's heritage — a place where the American frontier of 1803 and the art capitals of nineteenth-century Europe meet under one roof.
If you visit
Come to this house thinking about layers of ownership, because that is what the marker really records — a single address that passed from a figure of the Louisiana Purchase era to a Creole merchant family to one of the most celebrated painters of the modern age. Few houses hold that range in their deed.
Take in the New Orleans setting, with its distinctive architecture and its unmistakable blend of French, Spanish, Creole, and American character. The city's atmosphere is itself part of the story here; it helps explain what an artist's family from this world carried in their heritage, and why the place was thought worth preserving.
The home is recognized as a National Landmark, which is your signal that you are standing somewhere the nation itself considers historically important. On a New Orleans itinerary already rich with music, food, and architecture, this house adds a quieter thread — the unexpected meeting of the American founding era and the world of European art, both anchored to one address.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Edgar Degas
- · Michael Musson
- · William Kenner
- · William C.C. Claiborne
Themes & tags
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