Jockeys

Considered to be the best draughtsman of his generation, Degas called his work the result of “premeditated instantaneousness.” At least half of his mature work was devoted to dance subjects, resulting in approximately 1,500 drawings, prints, pastels, and paintings. Jockeys and nudes of women bathing were his other popular subjects; all three are represented in Hill-Stead’s collection. There were two periods in Degas’s career when jockeys were the subject of his work: first, in the 1860s, when Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were rebuilding Paris and planning Longchamps, the finest racetrack in the world; and second, in the early 1880s, when his work reflected his interest in the study of movement, photography, and Japanese art. This painting is from the latter period, where the influence of Japanese woodblock prints is evident in the artist’s compositional technique, namely in the truncating of the figures and the use of a diagonal line of mounted jockeys to create a dynamic perspective against the horizontal plane of fields and sky.