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A band of several galloping horses and riders move across the center of this vertical painting. The color palette is dominated by blended earthy brown, green, and pale pink. The horses, which have reddish-brown coats and tails, nearly span the width of the painting. They move to our left with their legs fully extended. Underneath the horses’ flying legs lies the body of a man. The felled rider faces upward, his eyes closed and his legs splayed. He has a light brown beard, mustache, and hair, and pale tan skin. He wears brown riding boots with black tops, white breeches, and a pink jersey with black sleeves. His riding helmet, with a matching pink cover, lies behind his head on the ground. At least three additional horses are in the band, and the two foremost have empty saddles. The two horses beyond them, farther into the picture, have male riders, who wear riding outfits and helmets in colors of smudged and blended orange, lavender purple, and green. They also have brown mustaches and beards. The band races through a field painted with a muddy green interspersed with strokes of orange and white. The horizon line is high, just above the level of the horses’ backs, about four-fifths of the way up the painting. Blue sky peeks out amid a mixture of pale pink and yellow clouds above. There are trees in the background indicated by a few strokes and dashes of paint. The painting style is loose and brushy throughout, without sharp detail or lines, except for the sketched-in black lines that delineate the bodies and tack of the horses.

Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, 1866, reworked 1880-1881 and c. 1897

Edgar Degas

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 83

It isn’t always easy to realize your vision. Degas often struggled with finishing his paintings, reworking them in his quest for perfection. This one proved especially challenging.

Degas originally painted this in 1866 but returned to it at least twice decades later. He made significant changes each time. Bits of the original blue sky peek through at the top of the canvas. And we can still see the rump and raised tail of a horse that has since disappeared. Rather than hiding the evidence, Degas leaves it exposed, allowing us to track the evolution of this painting.

Dive deeper

Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey was one of Degas' most ambitious early works. Painted in 1866 for exhibition at the Paris Salon, this painting marked a transition from the classically inspired history paintings of his youth toward the depiction of subjects drawn from modern life that would dominate his art for the rest of his career. The subject he chose was both fashionable and relatively novel: the steeplechase. First introduced into France in the 1830s, the steeplechase was—and remains today—a dangerous and at times controversial cross-country obstacle race. It had gained widespread popularity by the mid-1860s (the establishment of the Society of Steeplechases in 1863 had helped to legitimize the sport). Degas would have had ample opportunity to witness such races, perhaps while visiting his friends the Valpinçons at their estate in Ménil-Hubert in Normandy, a region renowned for its horse farms and racetracks.

Degas' portrayal of the subject was highly dramatic, underscoring the peril inherent in a sport where falls are a common and potentially deadly occurrence. In this he may have been inspired by the ambitious composition exhibited two years earlier at the Salon of 1864, Episode from a Bullfight painted by his friend and sometime rival Edouard Manet, which had garnered considerable, if not entirely flattering, notice. Like Manet, Degas chose a rather generic title—Scene from the Steeplechase—as if he were merely documenting an anonymous, though potentially tragic, sporting accident.

The sense of immediacy the painting seeks to evoke contrasts sharply with the artist's own working method, which was complex and painstaking. Degas produced several preparatory drawings for this painting, including several of the fallen jockey for which the artist's younger brother Achille served as model. Despite his efforts, neither the contemporary appeal of the subject nor its impressive dimensions piqued the interest of the critics, and it passed largely unnoticed.

Soon after the exhibition closed, Degas appears to have reworked at least part of the canvas. It was but the first of at least three transformations carried out by the artist over the span of some thirty years. In 1880, with the intention of selling the painting to Alexander Cassatt, the brother of the painter Mary Cassatt, Degas began reworking the painting a second time, altering the original composition and introducing another horse. Dissatisfied with the results, Degas refused to release the painting. In a letter to her son, Cassatt's mother observed bleakly of the painting: "I doubt if he ever sells it—he says it is one of those works which are sold after a man's death & artists buy them not caring whether they are finished or not."

In the mid-to-late 1890s, Degas returned to this painting a third time, transforming its appearance even more dramatically by adding an overlay of vibrant color to the sky and the jockey's silks. Virtually every inch of the canvas was reworked with one notable exception: the delicately painted face of the fallen jockey—Achille, who had died in 1893—was left untouched. True to Mrs. Cassatt's prediction, the painting remained in the artist's studio until his death.

Object Data

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 180 × 152 cm (70 7/8 × 59 13/16 in.)

framed: 202.57 × 173.67 × 6.67 cm (79 3/4 × 68 3/8 × 2 5/8 in.)

Credit Line

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Accession Number

1999.79.10

Artists / Makers

Edgar Degas (painter) French, 1834 - 1917

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
Read our full Open Access policy for images .

Detail Information

Inscription

lower right, vente stamp: Degas

Provenance

(Atelier Degas, first sale, Galerie Georges Petit, 6-8 May 1918, no. 19, as Aux Courses: le jockey blessé); (Joseph Durand-Ruel, Paris); (Ambrose Vollard [1867-1939], Paris); Jacques Seligmann, Paris; (his sale, American Art Galleries, New York, 27 January 1921, no. 70); purchased by (Seaman) for Gari Melchers [1860-1932], Fredericksburg, Virginia; by inheritance to his wife, Corinne Lawton Mackall Melchers [1880-1955, Mrs. Gari Melchers], Richmond, Virginia; her residuary legatee, Lawton Mackall;[1] (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York); purchased June 1960 by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; bequest 1999 to NGA.

[1] This is possibly Mrs. Melchers's brother, Alexander Lawton Mackall.

Associated Names

American Art Association
Anonymous
Degas, Atelier
Durand-Ruel, Joseph
Mackall, Lawton
Melchers, Corinne Lawton Mackall
Melchers, Gari
Seaman
Seligmann, Jacques
Vollard, Ambroise
Wildenstein & Co., Inc.

Exhibition History

1866: Annual Salon, Paris, 1866, no. 530, as Scène de steeple-chase.

1941: Loan to display with permanent collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1941.

1947: Works by Edgar Degas, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1947, no. 28, repro., as The Dead Jockey (Aux courses: le jockey blessé).

1960: Loan Exhibition: Degas, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 1960, no. 11, repro.

1966: French Paintings from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1966, no. 48, repro.

1998: Degas at the Races, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, no. 16, repro.

1999: An Enduring Legacy: Masterpieces from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1999-2000, no cat.

2010: Degas, Yokohama Museum of Art, 2010, no. 19, repro.

2011: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 2011, no. 14, repro.

2013: Degas' Method, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2013, no. 140, fig. 3.

2015: Loan for display with permanent collection, Art Institute of Chicago, 2015-2016.

2016: Degas: A New Vision, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2016-2017, unnumbered catalogue (shown only in Houston).

2016: Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, The Met Breuer, New York, 2016, no. 110, repro.

Bibliography

1966: Goldwater, Robert. "The Glory that was France." Art News 65 (March 1966): 86.

1982: Isaacson, Joel. "Impressionism and Journalistic Illustration." Arts Magazine 56, no. 10 (June 1982): 103, repro.

1991: Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. New York, 1991: 274.

1993: Rachlum, Stephanie. The Sam Spiegel Collection. Exh. cat. The Israel Museum. Jerusalem, 1993: 24, under no. 11.

1996: Roos, Jane Mayo. Early Impressionism and the French State (1866-1874). Cambridge, 1996: 60-61, fig. 50.

1998: Degas at the Races. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1998: no. 16.

2004: Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 374-375, no. 306, color repro.

2017: Hoenigswald, Ann, and Kimberly A. Jones. "The Question of Finish in the Work of Edgar Degas." In Degas, Daphne Barbour and Suzanne Quillen Lomax, eds. Facture. Conservation, Science, Art History 3 (2017): 20-49, esp. 26-30, 41, figs. 3 and 5 (infrared reflectogram).