Description
Year of creation: 1869
Original size: 55.9 cm x 36.5 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. 26.790)
At the Races in the Countryside – Edgar Degas
At the right stands a black carriage with a pair of horses in harness; the near bay is painted so close to the edge that the canvas cuts it. On the box sits a man in a light suit and a black top hat, holding the reins and a thin whip, and beside him crouches a black and white bulldog. Our canvas painting keeps exactly that unusual arrangement.
The carriage the edge cuts
The edge of the canvas cuts carriage and horse like a photographic crop – an unusual move for the painting of its day, one that turns the scene into a snapshot of something that has just gone past. Wheel, shaft and horse’s head end outside the picture, so the carriage seems still to be moving. The signature is at the lower left.
A family instead of a race
Inside the carriage sits a woman under a cream parasol, and beside her a wet nurse in white with a swaddled child in her lap. The scene is therefore not sport but an outing: the race is the reason the family is out of doors, not the thing we are shown. The bulldog sleeps, the horses stand, and nobody in the carriage looks towards the course.
The race in the background
At the left, behind, a wide green plain opens: riders in red and white silks, small women spectators with parasols, a low band of trees and houses on the horizon. The same moment in front of the stands is shown by Race Horses before the Stands, and the riders gathered before the start by the Gentlemen’s Race. The canvas measures 55.9 x 36.5 cm and is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
