The Parade

The Parade, also known as Horses in Front of the Stands, is one of the earliest canvases in which Edgar Degas turned to the subject of horses and riders, a theme that would recur throughout his work. The scene takes place at a racecourse. Two horses dominate the foreground, caught mid-stride, while spectators in the stands are suggested in the background. Degas was less concerned with faces or the details of the crowd than with fixing a fleeting instant of movement. The horses' legs are frozen at a precise moment, and the tails and jackets of the riders seem to flutter, heightening the sense of speed.

His choice of subject reflects the popularity of racecourses in the second half of the nineteenth century, when they became fashionable places for social life. Degas, who watched his contemporaries closely, brought the traditional genre of the horseman into a modern setting. He drew on the racing paintings of English artists, then highly successful, as well as on equestrian images by earlier masters and more recent painters.

Although the scene looks as if it were caught on the wing, the picture was built in the studio. Degas gathered impressions from his visits to the races and even used wooden horses, lit in different ways, to study effects of light. The composition is carefully balanced, and colour is one of its defining qualities. Yellows and reds are set against their complementary greens and purples, while white is distributed across the canvas so that the ladies' parasols echo the sleeves of the riders. The blue sky and ochre tones complete a rich palette, and even the chimneys in the distance supply a vertical accent that steadies the whole.

The painting shows Degas's interest in modern life and his effort to record movement with the freshness of Impressionism, combining close observation of motion with a deliberate control of space and colour.

Painter

Edgar Degas

Date

1866

Medium

paper, oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

46 × 61 cm

Museum

Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Genre

genre art

Depicts

crowd, equestrianism, stadium, factory

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