About this work
What arrests you first is the hush. Degas's racing pictures concentrate on the undramatic moments before the start — and here, a starting-post bisects the composition, creating an instantaneous effect suggestive of a snapshot, with figures and horses obscured, cut by the frame, and shown with the random feel of a fleeting glimpse.
Three jockeys on their thoroughbred horses are poised in the moments before the commencement of a race.
The foreground is dominated by a jockey turned toward the viewer, his calm and focused demeanor juxtaposed with the apparent movement of the horses, which seem restless and eager to launch.
The unconventional composition is matched by an experimental technique mixing oil, bodycolour, pastel, and essence — oil thinned with turpentine. The palette answers the mood: muted blues, greens, and browns conjure a hazy landscape in the background, holding the focus firmly on the jockeys and their mounts, while a luminous yellow sky reaches to the top of the picture, joining the textured grass below.
Degas returned to a composition he had first explored a decade earlier to produce this variation of the scene in 1878–79, now held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham.
For this version, he began anew on a larger scale, altering the earlier composition by bisecting the scene with a vertical starting pole in the foreground, combining earlier studies with new work to prepare the modified picture.
The overall lack of finish, with some quite accidental areas, challenged accepted conventions when the painting was shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition.
Degas rarely painted the actual races, preferring to look elsewhere — fascinated by the preparations for a race, by false starts, and the wait before the start, by the tension and the release of tension.
Rather than literal depictions of track activities, his compositions were constructed from elements he found intriguing, and his earliest racing scenes were among the first subjects he took from contemporary life.
As wall art, this is a painting for rooms that can absorb quiet drama — a study or library, a dining room with natural light that shifts across the day, or a hallway long enough to let the wide, horizontal sweep of the composition breathe. Degas displayed a diversity of equine postures and varied dynamics between horse and rider, treating the landscape with a simplicity that verges on abstraction, emphasizing the vital aspect of movement and interaction. It speaks to the viewer who finds more tension in anticipation than in action — who understands that the most
