art-Degas.com
Edgar Degas 1834-1917
Edgar Degas - Before the Race 1884
 Before the Race |
From Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD, USA:
Throughout the latter part of his career, Degas was obsessed with the restless beauty of the thoroughbred racehorse. Horse racing, which drew together throngs of people from many levels of society, was a singularly appropriate subject for representing modern life. Degas typically painted several versions of a composition, making slight variations in each. Here, riders and horses are shown in quiet and agitated movement. By the 1880s, Degas was making good use of recently published, stop-action photographs, which captured movement too fleeting to be perceived by the naked eye and which increased the artist's understanding of the horse in motion.