The Races at Longchamp

This freely executed painting captures the thrilling conclusion of a horse race at Longchamp, located at the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris. Here, Édouard Manet radically departed from conventional representations of the sport, in which races were shown from the side with the horses in profile. Instead, the competitors gallop thunderously toward the viewer, raising a cloud of turf, their pace underlined by the sweeping diagonals of the racetrack fences. In France, horse racing became an important form of popular entertainment during the nineteenth century. Imported from England, the racetrack—with its speed, spectacle, and luxury—was a quintessentially modern space. In Manet’s painting, a throng of fashionably dressed men and women press against the fences to witness the event—one man, at the upper left, uses binoculars to better observe the race. Unlike his friend Edgar Degas, for whom the racetrack was a constant source of inspiration, Manet produced only two paintings on the theme. Originally a much larger composition, this canvas was cut down to its present scale by the artist.