Interpretive Resource

Four Studies of a Jockey, 1866
Essence heightened with white gouache on brown paper
17 3/4 x 12 3/8 in. (45 x 35.5 cm)
Mr. And Mrs. Lewis Lamed Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.469

Although horses had long played an important role in French social life, from military hunts to royal parades, organized racing only arrived in Paris from England around the 1830s. Originally held on private estates, racing was an upper-class diversion attended primarily by males. In 1857, the new public race course Longchamps was completed in the most famous of the Second Empire’s new parks, the Bois de Bologna. The races, attended by Degas, were a highlight of the social season. But Degas’s interest was not social. Rather, his passion was depicting jockeys and horses in motion, for what could better encapsulate the rapidly changing modern world than these "animated urban machines", as art historian Robert Herbert called them.

Degas manipulated his jockeys -- like his ballerinas -- as if they were puppets, moving the figures around this way and that, to show their sense of movement and control. In this drawing, he divides his sheet into four parts, placing the rear view of a faceless jockey into each section. He merely suggests the figure of a horse, searching instead for the most natural balancing of the rider on his mount. We see here Degas’s masterful line, his emphasis on contour as he conveys the figure of the shifting jockey with single, long strokes of gouache or ink. He also deftly renders the sheen of the jockey’s racing silks, whose brilliant colors were one of the racetrack’s brightest spectacles.

Already reflected in this early work is Degas’s technical inventiveness, with his use of brown essence, or thinned oil paint, to prime, or coat, the dark oil paper. He then draws his figures with black ink and white gouache. Degas made a number of these brilliant essence-and-gouache studies during 1866-1868, forming what has been called a virtual "visual grammar of the horse race." Degas’s works documenting his devotion to the racetrack reached their peak during the mid-1880s, then, following the narrowing of his visual vocabulary, dropped toward the end of the decade until the subject disappeared altogether.

Classroom Suggestions 1. Have students examine Four Studies of a Jockey. How does each of the four studies differ? How did the artist use line and color to create the illusion of form -- the massive hindquarters of the horses? The compact and poised bodies of the jockeys? The fullness of their racing shirts? What did Degas depict in detail and what did he only suggest?
2. Degas made this work to study the "visual grammar of the horse race." Discuss with students the concept of "visual grammar" -- the form and structure of the way something looks. Have students examine the visual grammar of the human figure, creating four studies of a fellow classmate in various poses. Pencil, charcoal, and pastel are excellent media for this exercise.

3. At the time of these studies, horseracing was an established leisure activity. Have students research other recreational pastimes in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Paris. What historic and social conditions allowed for their emergence and popularity? Have students find paintings of these leisure activities by other Impressionist artists.