Detail of Racehorses before the Stands by Degas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: Racehorses before the Stands

Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)

Date: 1866–68

Geography: Country of Origin France

Culture: French

Medium: Oil on paper mounted on canvas

Dimensions: 18 1/8 × 24 in. (46 × 61 cm)
Framed: 27 15/16 × 33 7/16 in. (71 × 85 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1981)


Degas often painted on a sheet of paper that was then mounted on canvas. Here his medium was essence—oil paint thinned with solvents—which he worked like watercolor on paper. To that end, he left the sheet blank in many places to make highlights and applied the paint like a stain to create the dark shadows cast by the sharp sunlight. Unlike Manet’s contemporary Races at Longchamp, which conveys the adrenaline-fueled excitement of a thundering finish, Degas’s composition frames the horses and their jockeys during an off moment, apart from the action. Whether real or imaginary, the racetrack served as the artist’s stage for a strikingly modern scene, setting a bourgeois leisure activity against an industrial landscape of billowing smokestacks.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/845052