Interpretive Resource

AT THE RACES Salon exhibitions of the 1840's and 50's bore witness to a dramatic increase in paintings of French landscape and rural civilization, and those of the 1860s announced a growing preoccupation with modern urban imagery. Manet was the leader of this later, iconographic trend, and his Luncheon on the Grass (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), shown in the1863 Salon des Refuses, and Olympia (Musee d’Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon of 1865, brought modern life and the world of sophisticated mores directly before the public. The most sought-after subjects of such urban realists were associated with Parisians at play, and the paintings, drawings, and prints they made present Paris in ways quite consistent with the city’s self-image as the world capital of leisure and luxury. Manet explored the parks and boulevards during the daytime and attended the opera and ballet in the evenings. Shortly after they met in 1859 or 1860, Manet and Edgar Degas began to vie with one another to find new cosmopolitan subjects. It was at the horse races that their visual interests overlapped most closely in the first decade of their friendship; these three works of art explore various aspects of this most fashionable of outdoor spectator sports. Although horse racing had long been practiced in France, it had its first great age in the Second Empire (1852-70) during the reign of Napoleon III, when intense anglophilia led to the creation of that most chic of men’s establishments, "le Jockey Club." It was during the Second Empire that the splendid racecourse at Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne was finished, making it easy for residents of the fashionable west side of Paris to go to the races.

Manet and Degas seem to have raced each other to the races, and each of their initial attempts at this difficult subject proved to be a failure. Dating from around 1862, Degas’s earliest canvases show a definite dependence on British racing prints and Gericault’s considerably earlier paintings of English horse races. By 1863, Manet was at work on a large canvas entitled Aspects of a Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne, intended for exhibition the following year. It seems clear from the surviving evidence that Manet never exhibited, and possibly never completed, the painting, although a highly finished watercolor and gouache at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, records it in detail. Manet evidently cut the original painting into sections, because two small canvases representing female spectators survive. However, he probably never salvaged the main part of the picture, preferring to create another canvas in 1867, which is now in the Art Institute. For Manet, the race itself was a total event. In the museum’s composition, for the first time in the history of art, the viewer is startled into believing that he is standing not safely along the sidelines, but directly in the center of the track with six horses charging full speed toward him! This threat to the sense of the viewer’s well-being is perhaps the painting’s most extraordinary aspect of modernism. The rest of the scene is a blur, brilliantly and rapidly painted so that one’s attention cannot deviate from the thundering excitement of the race. Like Ingres, whom he so admired, Degas was always more analytical and conscious of detail than Manet. He was less concerned with the spectacle of the race itself than with the machinations of the spectators or the periods just before or after the main event, when the jockeys’ movements are slow and deliberate. In Four Studies of a Jockey, the riders sit stationary atop their invisible mounts, suggesting that the drawing was made from a model in the artist’s studio, rather than from an actual jockey at the race. The same detachment characterizes Degas’s beautifully finished portrait drawing of an unidentified gentleman spectator, who himself is on horseback. Interestingly, Degas never used these two drawings as preparations for larger works. Rather, he made them, along with other separate studies of figures at the horse race, to familiarize himself with each aspect of the event. Whereas Manet’s impulse was to grasp the essence of the whole visual field and to interpret the race as intensely directed motion, Degas’s was to create a grammar of form with which to construct a painting. His earliest successful paintings of the race are just as we would expect them to be, that is, quite the opposite of Manet’s Races at Longchamps. With their precise, almost enameled surfaces and lack of single focus, they are as radical in their lack of psychological cohesiveness as Manet’s painting is in its unity of motion.

Even if he did not share Manet’s preoccupation with speed, Degas was no less fascinated with movement. In these sheets, the instability and balance of the riders captivated Degas, and there is a sense in which the artist compared the training and preparation of the race horse with that of ballet dancers. Later in life, he devoted a sonnet to a comparison of horse and ballerina. In early preparatory drawings such as these, he aestheticized the race, emphasizing the aspects of costume and pose that would have appealed to any seasoned observer of court life in either the eighteenth or the nineteenth century. Indeed, for all his vaunted interest in modern life, Degas was less modern than Manet in his mode of representing that life. Surely, it is no accident that his sheet of Four Studies of a jockey is a mise-en-page that recalls the drawings of eighteenth-century artist Antoine Watteau, whose interest in depicting rustling silks surpassed even that of Degas.