Description
Year of creation: 1862
Original size: 61 cm x 48 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 1982)
Gentlemen’s Race. Before the Start – Edgar Degas
A group of riders has gathered across the middle of the canvas and moves at a walk before the start. The silks are varied: a green jacket with a red cap, a yellow cap, a blue jacket, a white cap. To the right of centre a rider in a light blue jacket and cream breeches stands out on a bay. Our oil painting on canvas keeps that moment before the beginning, when nothing has happened yet.
Waiting, not racing
The title promises a race; the canvas shows the time before it. The horses walk, they do not run; the riders talk, adjust their reins and each look in a different direction. There is no finishing line, no leading horse, none of the tension of a contest. Degas chose exactly the part of the event that a sporting scene usually skips, and put it in the middle of the picture.
The rider the edge cuts through
At the right edge a rider in red is seen from behind and is cut in half by the canvas. That cut is not a fault of the composition but its rule: the scene continues outside the frame, and the viewer is placed among the riders rather than in front of them. The same race after the fall is shown by The Fallen Jockey, and the horses immediately before running by Race Horses before the Stands.
Chimneys behind the hills
At the left stands a dark cluster of spectators; further right, carriages and small figures with parasols line up in the distance. Behind low green hills, factory chimneys rise at the right and their smoke drifts away. The racecourse is therefore not a rural idyll but the edge of a city that has just expanded up to it. The canvas measures 61 x 48 cm and is today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
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.
