Les Courses à Longchamp

Horse racing was a fashionable new craze in the Paris of the 1860s. The track at Longchamp had opened in 1857 in the Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of the city, and under the Second Empire race day became a society event. Most painters showed the horses in crisp side-on profile, the way sporting prints always had. Manet swung the whole scene around and sent the field charging straight down the course toward you, their legs dissolved into a blur of speed and kicked-up turf, the crowd a smear of colour along the rails. It is often called the first painting to bring racehorses head-on at the viewer. He came back to this same stretch of track more than once over the next few years.