Description
Year of creation: 1866
Original size: 61 cm x 46 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on paper mounted on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 1981)
Race Horses before the Stands – Edgar Degas
At the left stands a grandstand with a striped awning and a dark pointed roof, and beneath it a crowd of spectators with pale parasols, separated from the course by a white rail. The riders’ shadows stretch far across the ochre track. Our oil painting on canvas keeps exactly that long afternoon light.
A rider seen from behind
In the foreground a rider in an orange cap and orange-and-white silks is seen from behind, on a brown horse. Because we do not see his face he is not the hero of the scene but its measure: against him one reads how far away the stand, the rail and the other horses are. At the right stands a group of four horses with riders – one in a red cap, one in green silks, one in a pale cap, and another in red at the edge.
The horse that bolted
Among them one dark horse has bolted and carried off the rider in the red cap. That small event is the only thing actually happening in the scene – everything else stands or waits. Degas does not put it in the middle and does not stress it with colour; it has to be noticed, exactly as at a real racecourse.
Paper, not canvas
The support is not canvas but paper mounted on canvas – a technique Degas also used for other early racing scenes. In the background factory chimneys rise with their smoke, which places the course at the edge of a city rather than in open country; the same city beside the track is shown by the Gentlemen’s Race, and the race as a family outing by At the Races in the Countryside. The signature is at the lower left.
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.
