About this work
Two horses — a dark bay and a cream-white — stand together on a grassy hill overlooking a river or canal.
The dark bay rests his head over the back of his gray companion, conveying a sense of peaceful companionship.
Beyond them, the grassy ridge dips toward a waterway that crosses the full width of the canvas, and several buildings line the nearer shore.
At least one structure has parchment-white walls and a red roof, and gray smoke drifts from several chimneys.
Long, low boats float near the far bank, and the land rises beyond them into a hill where more animals graze in distant pastures.
The scene is loosely painted, with the background growing more indistinct as the eye travels toward the horizon — a deliberate softening that draws attention back to the quiet presence of the horses in the foreground. The ivory-white sky is touched with pale petal-pink and a hint of blue near the horizon, giving the whole canvas the atmosphere of early morning or fading afternoon.
Now held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., *Horses in a Meadow* is an oil on canvas dated 1871 — a year of sharp personal disruption for Degas. Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas had enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. The small, tranquil canvas reads as a deliberate retreat from that turbulence. His connection to horses stretched back to 1861, when he visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy and made the earliest of his many studies of the animal.
By the late 1860s, Degas had shifted from history painting to original observation of contemporary life, and racecourse scenes gave him a natural opportunity to depict horses and their riders in a modern context. *Horses in a Meadow* is something different — not the tension of a race, but a pastoral stillness — and its intimacy sets it apart within his equestrian output. Degas's application of paint is loose and impressionistic, capturing the ephemeral quality of light and atmosphere rather than focusing on meticulous detail.
This is a painting that earns its place in a room that prizes quiet. It suits living spaces with natural light and an unhurried quality — a reading room, a study, a dining room with warm wood tones that echo the painting's sage greens and earthy browns. The viewer it speaks to is one who
