Die Pferderennbahn. Amateurjockeys neben einer Kutsche

The singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, a star baritone of the Paris Opera and a serious collector, commissioned this racecourse scene from Degas in 1874. He then waited 13 years for it. Degas kept the canvas, reworked it, set it aside and came back to it, and only handed it over in 1887, one of several Faure pictures the painter held hostage to his own second thoughts. The subject looks spontaneous, four amateur jockeys in bright silks strung out across the field with a carriage watching at the right, but almost nothing here is caught from life. Degas built these scenes in the studio from memory and from drawings, shifting the horses like figures on a stage. The low horizon and the wide empty foreground owe as much to Japanese prints as to any afternoon at the track.