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At the Races in the Countryside

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
1869

Medium/Technique Oil on canvas
Dimensions 36.5 x 55.9 cm (14 3/8 x 22 in.)
Credit Line 1931 Purchase Fund
Accession Number26.790
NOT ON VIEW
CollectionsEurope
ClassificationsPaintings
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.

InscriptionsLower left: Degas
ProvenanceSeptember 17, 1872, sold by the artist to Durand-Ruel, Paris (stock no. 1910) [see note 1]; October 12, 1872, sent to Durand-Ruel, London; April 25, 1873, sold by Durand-Ruel through Charles Deschamps, Paris, to Jean-Baptiste Faure (b. 1830 -d. 1914), Paris; January 2, 1893, sold by Faure to Durand-Ruel, Paris (stock no. 2566); March 29, 1918, deposited with the Durand-Ruel family, Les Balans; December 20, 1926, sold by Durand-Ruel, New York to the MFA for $30,000. (Accession Date: December 20, 1926)

NOTES:
[1] The provenance given here is taken from Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Degas at the Races" (exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998), p. 248, cat. no. 38.