+ Expand

Notes:
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Brame & Lorenceau.

PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, UK

LITERATURE:
Alan Wofsy, Degas Atelier at Auction, Paintings, Pastels & Drawings
Sales III & IV - 1919, San Francisco, 1989, p. 257, no. 274, illustrated

Gustave Moreau would appear to have introduced the subject of the racecourse to the young Edgar Degas in Italy, where both artists met during their individual study trips to the peninsula, in March 1860.

Although Degas had already become interested in the equestrian works of both Théodore Gericault and Alfred de Dreux, he did not begin any kind of series on the racecourse until 1860-1862. It was in the 1860s, however, that Degas allowed the subject to become his predominant area of interest together with ballet. During this period he records moments on the racecourse in the full modernity of his art with naturalism.

The present drawing shows off the figure of a young jockey, not dissimilar to the one occupying the centre foreground of Degas' Gentlemen's Race: Before the Start begun in 1862 and reworked around 1882. (Musée d'Orsay, Paris. RF1982). In fact the pose appears to have been taken up repeatedly by the artist throughout the 1880s. At this time he had a keen interest in a modern interpretation of the visual world, which also embraced photography.

A sheet at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford of a study of the same figure in charcoal on blue-grey paper, has been dated c.1882-1884. This is recognised as forming part of the artist's on-going studies and reworkings of the Gentlemen's Race. Rather than a professional jockey the present drawing shows a boy hardly out of adolescence. Degas has delicately outlined the figure in a few strokes of the pencil.