The Jockey

Motivated by the popularity of the races, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec executed this lithograph both in color, seen here, and in black and white. He intended to publish the color version in a portfolio of horse-racing subjects, but the project never came to fruition and Jockey was published alone. The artist's admiration for Edgar Degas's horse-racing pictures is clear in Jockey, and he shared Degas's appreciation of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Particular elements of the lithograph reveal the influence of the Japanese woodcut: the overall flatness; the daring cropping—particularly of the background horse whose head and hindquarters have been omitted; the pale green hue of the grass and the blue-violet sky; and the dramatic, rushing perspective of the horses galloping into the distance. However, the younger artist incorporated the Japanese aesthetic into his own visual language in an entirely original way. Unlike Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec ignored Eadweard Muybridge's photographs and depicted his horse and rider in the physically impossible "flying-gallop" position.