Scène de steeple-chase : le jockey tombé

Degas showed this at the Paris Salon of 1866, when he was in his early 30s and still better known for careful history subjects than for the racecourse. A jockey has been thrown and lies motionless in the grass while the horses pound on above him. But the picture in front of you is not really the one from 1866. Degas kept it in his studio and reworked it twice more, once around 1880 and again near the end of the century, more than 30 years after he began. He never fully covered his tracks. Look near the top and you can still find patches of the original blue sky, and the pale rump of a horse he painted over but never quite erased.