1890
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Horse and Rider is a 1890 by Edgar Degas, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a racehorse mid-gallop with a top-hatted rider barely sketched in. The horse’s legs bend in impossible ways—Degas studied motion like a dancer. The rider’s face is a blur, almost an afterthought. Degas loved racing scenes but cared more about the horse’s power than the rider. He sketched this from real horses, not just imagination. The background is simple, so the focus stays on the animal’s energy. This feels like his ballet dancers—just a quick study of movement. Next, look up Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).
Degas’s drawing Gentleman Rider alludes to the steeplechase, a fashionable race in which the riders were not professional jockeys but, instead, “gentlemen.” Here, Degas demonstrated his unceasing interest in the horse’s anatomy in motion, playfully revising the position of the animal’s hind legs, as he would a dancer’s. The top-hatted rider remains a ghostly shadow—it is clearly the horse rather than its rider who captured the artist’s imagination.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on 19 July 1834 in Paris, Edgar Degas came from an affluent banking family with aristocratic roots and spent his childhood among the cultivated circles of the French capital.
See the richer artist page
