Degas, Edgar (1834-1917)
Aux courses en province (At the Races in the Countryside)
1869
Oil on canvas, 36.5 x 55.9 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
At once merging and disrupting the traditional categories of landscape, genre scene, and family portrait, Degas depicts a scene of upper-class leisure: a visit to the horse race. While mounted onlookers glimpse three jockeys and horses mid-race within a sparse Normandy landscape, the subject of this painting seems rather to be the intimate scene of modern life, leisure, and labor taking place in the foreground. In the driver’s seat of a horse-drawn carriage, Degas’s smartly-dressed friend Paul Valpinçon—echoed by his loyal canine companion—gazes down at his passengers: his wife, holding a parasol, and his infant son Henri, asleep in the arms of his working-class wet nurse, her breast still exposed. Degas underscores the immediacy of the race and the depicted family moment through his abrupt compositional cropping. This small but complex painting was among the artist’s contributions to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. (MFA)