Dali House

“Race Horses” by Edgar Degas, stabled at the Musée d’Orsay

After decades of rural landscapes lining the walls of the Paris salons, French painters in the 1860s turned to modern urban life. Edouard Manet led the parade of Parisians at play with “Luncheon on the Grass” and quickly had a rival in Edgar Degas, with his always popular ballet scenes.

Their interest converged here at fashionable Longchamp racecourse, which opened in 1857, during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, an integral element in Baron Haussmann’s replanned city. At the Bois de Boulogne home of “le Jockey Club”, seen here in a Google Earth image, Degas initially tried and failed to reproduce the imagery he’d seen in British racing prints and Gericault’s paintings of English horse races, and Manet at first struggled too.

Manet abandoned his large “Aspects of a Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne” after attempting to correct the composition by sawing off parts of it (a watercolour of the original survives). He did better with his second effort, “The Races at Longchamps” from 1866, now at the Art Institute of Chicago – that’s only a picture of it above, but you knew that.

“For the first time in the history of art,” Richard Brettell writes in “French Salon Artists: 1800-1900″, “the viewer is startled into believing that he is standing not safely along the sidelines, but directly in the centre of the track with six horses charging full speed toward him!

“This threat to the sense of the viewer’s well-being is perhaps the painting’s most extraordinary aspect of modernism. The rest of the scene is a blur, brilliantly and rapidly painted so that one’s attention cannot deviate from the thundering excitement of the race.”

Degas preferred the spectators to the spectacle of the race, and the jockeys as they made their preparations, much like the ballet dancers who preceded them in his fanciful eye.

“Whereas Manet’s impulse was to grasp the essence of the whole visual field and to interpret the race as intensely directed motion, Degas’ was to create a grammar of form with which to construct a painting,” Brettell says. “With their precise, almost enameled surfaces and lack of single focus, they are as radical in their lack of psychological cohesiveness as Manet’s painting is in its unity of motion.”

Degas, having followed the well-to-do patrons of the ballet and opera to Longchamp, ended up completing no fewer than 45 paintings, 20 pastels, some 250 sketches and 17 sculptures with a racing theme.

In “The Jockeys” above, not so incidentally, that pole bisecting the view as well as a horse’s head wasn’t lost on viewers. He was deliberately jarring the perspective with his “snapshot” composition, much as his ballerinas had occupied the edges of the scenes he painted, with limbs disappearing beyond the frame.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec came to the races later, no doubt seeking a bit of fresh air after all those smoky nights at the Moulin Rouge. That’s his “At the Race Course” above, and below, “The Jockey”, still a favourite in betting shops everywhere 107 years after it was painted.

Interestingly, Toulouse-Lautrec was also devoted to bicycling, then still a young sport, but all that exercise didn’t save him from an early death.