At the Racecourse

In 1861 the young Degas went to stay with a childhood friend, Paul Valpinçon, at his family's estate at Ménil-Hubert in Normandy, not far from the national horse stud at Le Pin. He had trained as a city painter on the old masters, and this open racing country was new to him. The horses he watched and sketched there started a subject he would return to for the rest of his life, and this is one of his very first attempts at it, made around 1861. The riders sit small under a wide pale sky, the ground rolling away behind them. You can feel him still working out how to set living animals and men in real space rather than copy a racing print. Degas never cared much for the drama of the finish. Here, as later, he watches the loose waiting moments around the race, the horses ambling and the jockeys only half attentive. He made dozens more racecourse pictures over the next 40 years, though the broad Normandy daylight of this early one he rarely used again.