Gentlemen's Race. Before the Start

Organised flat racing on the English model was still a novelty in France when Degas painted this in 1862. The grand Longchamp course in the Bois de Boulogne had opened only five years earlier, under Napoleon the Third, and the racecourse was becoming one of the fashionable stages of Paris life. Degas, drawn to modern spectacle, caught not the gallop but the loose, nervy minutes before the off, the mounts strung across the field in a long frieze against open country. Amateur gentleman riders sit their horses in the pale light. He was not done with it. About 20 years later, around 1882, he took the canvas up again and reworked parts of it.