Rennpferde in Longchamp

The Longchamp racecourse opened in 1857 on the western edge of Paris, and it quickly became a place to be seen as much as to watch the horses. Degas went often. He was as drawn to the track as to the ballet, and in both he ignored the main event. There is no finish line and no thundering climax here, only jockeys in bright silks walking their mounts in loose clusters after a race, one horse turned awkwardly aside. He builds the scene from odd, cropped angles, as if glimpsed from a moving carriage, a way of seeing he was learning partly from photography and Japanese prints. Degas began the small canvas around 1871 and reworked it a few years later. In 1903 it became the first painting by Degas to enter an American museum, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired it.