At the Races in the Countryside (A Carriage at the Races)

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At the Races in the Countryside (A Carriage at the Races): Edgar Degas

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edgar Degas Oil Painting - At the Races in the Countryside (A Carriage at the Races)

Keywords: Races, Countryside, Carriage, Races

Work Overview: At the Races in the Countryside (A Carriage at the Races)
1869
Edgar Degas
36.5 x 55.9 cm (14 3/8 x 22 in.)
Oil on canvas
Style Impressionism
Genre genre painting
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA, US

This painting was one of the first works that Degas sold (in 1872) to Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who became the early champion of the Impressionists. It is not only a landscape but also a scene from everyday life and - most of all - a family portrait. The driver of the carriage is Degas’s friend Paul Valpinçon, who is shown with his wife, a wet nurse, and in the nurse’s lap, the couple’s son, Henri.
With its subtly ironic title - the races play a minor role in the composition - the painting was among the artist’s contributions to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

DEGAS' EYE AT THE RACES OFTEN STRAYED to the spectators as well as the jockeys, and in this delightful small picture he has given us a scene of elegance and charm completely embodying French life of the period. In its day the composition must have seemed unusually daring, for the principal element in the design - the victoria of the gentleman driver - is placed in the bottom right of the canvas and sharply cut by the frame. Degas undoubtedly derived this point of view from photography, in which he had become deeply interested at this time.

More important today is the controlled artistry with which the whole picture is planned and painted. "The most beautiful things in art come from renunciation," the painter was fond of saying, and he has here severely limited his colors to a few finely attuned and greyed hues. Here and there a stronger note balances the cool springtime green of the field and the delicate neutral sky, itself a miracle of subtle, atmospheric painting. Compared to the broken color and striking effects of light that the Impressionists were then employing, A Carriage at the Races seems definitely traditional, harking back to the harmonies of Corot rather than paralleling the color experiments of Monet. The firm, decisive drawing contributes to the clarity of the conception while the flat technique recalls the fact that Degas insisted that "nature was smooth."

Amusing, as social comment, is the insistence of the English character of the scene, the victoria, the driver's top hat, the bulldog. English styles were then much the fashion in France among the upper classes.

Horse racing, a sport of English origin, became popular on the Continent at the end of the eighteenth century, and soon inspired such painters as Carle Vernet and Théodore Géricault, who were both influenced by English artists. It attracted the interest of later painters, too. Manet emphasized the elegance of these occasions, while Degas preferred to observe the horses in motion. He focused on the movements of man and animal. His first sketches of racecourses date back to the beginning of the 1860s. At first he was interested in the jockeys, but he also turned a keen eye on the spectators. This led to the At the Races in the Countryside.

Degas never tires of the theme of the racecourse. On September 27, 1881, the newspaper "Le Globe" started publishing Major Muybridge's photographs of a galloping horse, and Degas used them for his sketches. The photographs showed that traditional English prints were inaccurate when depicting galloping horses with their front legs outstretched. This is how Degas painted the horses racing in the background of At the Races in the Countryside of 1869.

Degas exhibited this moderately colourful work at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The race itself is in the background, the foreground is occupied by a family scene centred on a baby, with the nurse, mother, father and even the dog atop the box. The family is the Valpinçon family: the driver of the carriage is Degas's friend Paul Valpinçon, who is shown with his wife, a wet nurse, and in the nurse's lap, the couple's son, Henri. The people in the carriage are caught in their fashionable elegance.

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At the Races in the Countryside (A Carriage at the Races)

Edgar Degas

Work Overview