Edgar Degas - The Parade Notebook

The Parade / Race Horses in front of the Tribunes (Le Défilé), painted between 1866 and 1868 in oil on paper mounted on canvas by French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. Racehorses and jockeys pass in front of the grandstands, forming a horizontal sequence of bodies, bright silks and repeated legs. Degas treats the parade before the race as a subject in itself, concentrating on controlled movement and observation rather than the speed of competition. The low, elongated grouping anticipates the cropped and unconventional viewpoints he would later use for dancers and urban scenes. This early racing picture helped establish the horse and rider as one of the recurring modern subjects through which Degas studied balance, posture and movement.