Degas at the Races
Before the ballet took over, Degas's other great subject was the racecourse: jockeys in bright silks, restless horses and the long wait before the start.
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About the series
Degas painted horse races from the early 1860s, a few years after Paris opened its racecourse at Longchamp in 1857. The race itself interested him less than the moments around it: riders circling at a walk, a horse shying, the crowd and the carriages on the grass.
He worked in the studio from sketches and small wax models of horses, which let him study a pose from every side. In the 1880s he looked closely at Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of horses in motion, published in 1878, which showed that the legs-outstretched gallop painters had used for centuries was wrong. At the Races in the Countryside, known in English as A Carriage at the Races, with a family in a carriage and a dog in the foreground, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Most are wide and low, with a band of horses across a broad green field, so they suit a long wall above a desk or a console.
