At the Races

Edgar Degas’s desire to capture the fleeting moment in a painting is best served by horse races and dancing, his two great motifs. In this endeavour Degas was entirely an Impressionist, although he always bridled at the label.
While Edouard Manet gives us the race itself, Degas focuses on jockeys warming up their mounts before the event begins. This moment inspired him with its variety of gaits and multiple perspectives on the horses. The movements and attitudes of his human subjects are clearly drawn, and the picture seems conceived as a snapshot. The burgeoning technique of photography played a significant role in the representation of dynamic processes and new points of view. The section of horse’s tail at the painting’s right edge, cut off on the left, conveys a cinematic rhythm. In this pastel Degas further studies the problems of the movement and grouping of figures in space and on the surface of an image. The two horses to the fore emphasize the severity of the composition, with the landscape arranged in parallel with the perspective. The animals’ spontaneous movement, which coalesces into a single form in the background, provides a suspenseful contrast. Degas enhances the natural rhythm with the glowing colours used for his jockeys.
The painter’s growing preoccupation with horse races during the early 1860s may have had to do with a sojourn in England. Degas subscribes wholly to the contemporary demand for motifs drawn from modern life, such as the leisure pastimes of the metropolitan middle class. The theme of the horse race can be found throughout all of his work in the seventies and eighties. Around the middle of the nineties his interest in the subject began to wane, as Degas, whose eyesight had been failing since 1880, went almost totally blind.