Before the Race

By the early 1880s a debate that had run for years was being settled by the camera. Photographers like Eadweard Muybridge had begun freezing a galloping horse frame by frame, and for the first time people could see that all four hooves really do leave the ground at once, tucked under the belly rather than splayed out. Degas followed this closely. Here the horses and jockeys are not racing but waiting, shifting and turning before the start, each animal caught in a slightly different attitude of restlessness. Of the three versions Degas made of this scene, this one stays closest to a sketch, the ground barely there, the paint laid on thin so the riders seem to hover at the edge of movement.