About this work
The horses stand along the ridge of a grassy hill that dips beyond to a waterway crossing the width of the composition. Several buildings line the near shore — at least one with parchment-white walls and a red roof, another in peanut-brown with a darker chocolate-brown roof — while gray smoke wafts from several chimneys and long, low boats float near the opposite bank. On the far hill, more horses graze in distant pastures. The scene is loosely painted, growing more indistinct toward the background; touches of brown and green suggest trees receding into the distance, and the ivory-white sky is touched with pale petal-pink and a hint of blue near the horizon. A white horse anchors the foreground, its form commanding immediate attention — with flecks of tone marking the back of its legs and horizontal lines running through the horizon and meadow lending the whole image a quiet, rhythmic energy.
The origin of this print is Degas' masterly 1872 oil painting of the same name, now held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — a work the artist sold to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for his personal collection. In 1891, Galerie Durand-Ruel commissioned a deluxe, limited-edition bound volume of prints after paintings in that private collection, including *Chevaux dans la Prairie*.
When Degas saw the copyist's version of the composition, he considered it so disappointing that he promptly made his own print. The differences are striking: he eliminated many short drypoint lines and substituted soft-ground etching to create bolder marks, and he also flipped the image so the composition faces the other direction. The resulting work, a soft-ground etching with aquatint and drypoint dating to 1891–92 , is a testament to Degas' perfectionism — a rare moment when his equestrian subjects, usually associated with the racetrack's electric tension, are allowed to simply rest in open countryside.
His equestrian studies often show Degas representing the horses' fidgety impatience and coiled energy, pointing toward his central artistic obsession: how to represent the dynamism of movement on the flat, still surface of a canvas. *Horses in the Meadow* offers something rarer — stillness, space, and air. It belongs in a room that values quietude: a study lined with natural materials, a bedroom with warm afternoon light, or a hallway where the eye needs somewhere unhurried to land. The print's tonal restraint — ink-dark lines against open ground — means it holds its own against both
