Jockeys Before the Start
Artwork by Edgar Degas • 1862
🖼️ Reproduce this artwork — 📗 Book on Edgar Degas on Amazon
About this artwork - painting analysis
As early as 1862, Edgar Degas turned his fascinated gaze upon the world of horse racing with Jockeys before the Start, capturing the suspended moment that precedes the race. In the foreground, several riders in vibrant silks – lemon yellow, bright red, immaculate white – wait upon their mounts in an atmosphere of feverish concentration. Behind them, a dense crowd of spectators presses forward, while in the background a rolling landscape emerges beneath a sky laden with luminous clouds. The composition adopts a bold, almost photographic framing, which already testifies to the painter's early interest in novel angles and fleeting snapshots seized from life.
The chromatic palette rests on earthy tones – ochres, deep browns, darkened greens – which make the vivid touches of the jockeys' attire vibrate. Degas works here in oil with a technique still relatively academic, bearing witness to his classical training under Louis Lamothe, a disciple of Ingres. Yet the brushwork already reveals greater freedom in the treatment of sky and grass, heralding the Impressionist investigations to come. This youthful work marks the beginning of a lasting fascination with the world of racing, a theme the artist would explore throughout his career with a marked preference for preparatory moments rather than the action itself.
Created at the threshold of the 1860s, this canvas predates by several years the official birth of Impressionism and belongs to a period when Degas frequented Longchamp racecourse assiduously, inaugurated in 1857. Unlike the Barbizon landscapists or the future Impressionists working en plein air, he favored meticulous observation of behavior, attitudes, and equine anatomy, later recreating his compositions in the studio from sketches and memory. Held at the Musée d'Orsay, Jockeys before the Start remains a precious testimony to the nascent modernity of Degas's vision, who made the racetrack a subject as worthy as academic mythological scenes.
If you appreciate "Jockeys Before the Start" and other paintings by Edgar Degas, we offer you 10% off the purchase of an art poster from our partner europosters with the promo code GRANDSPEINTRES10.
Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
