The injured jockey

Around 1896, in his sixties, Degas came back to an image that had troubled him for 30 years, a jockey thrown from his horse and lying on the ground. He had first painted a fallen rider back in 1866, for the Salon, and reworked that earlier canvas more than once without ever settling it. This late version is large, about 181 by 151 centimetres, and laid in with a broad, loose hand. The horse rears pale and huge over the small dark figure below it, and the field around them is barely described, worked in wide sweeps of thinned paint. There are no other riders, no crowd, no finish line, none of the setting he gave his cheerful early racing scenes. What is left is the plain fact of a body on the grass and an animal that has got away from it. He kept working the surface late into the 1890s, and the picture has the unfinished, searching look of something he was still turning over.