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"Races at The Bois de Boulogne" №23869
"Races at The Bois de Boulogne" №23869
Art. number: 23869
Description
Five years after revolutionizing the depiction of a horse race Manet painted a scene that, through normal perception, is painfully outmoded. John Richardson observed that unlike Degas "who knew from experience exactly how a horse's body was articulated, Manet copied his stylized animals from English sporting prints." Degas, of course, was famous for painting horses; Manet not.
Yet Manet's horses are meant to resemble a painting and not just any painting. That is why the figure in the top hat in the lower right-hand corner of Manet's painting is Degas himself. He is an alter ego of Manet facing the canvas as Manet himself did. The horses, meanwhile, were not inspired by sporting prints, as Richardson claimed, but......
........ by a painting by Gericault in the Louvre. The neck and legs of the lead horse make that obvious. Think about it. Degas, celebrated in Manet's own day for his paintings of horses, is facing a "painting" of horses by Gericault, one great master of equine pictures representing another. Manet even told Berthe Morisot that ‘not being in the habit of painting horses, I copied mine from those who know best how to do them.’
As so often in Manet's art, this is a scene in the artist's mind of the painting's own creation which is why the subject of the painting has merged with the studio setting. Degas-as-Gericault-as-Manet paints "his picture". The large post by Degas' shoulder, the most prominent, touches his "composition" and is probably, like the tool in Courbet’s Stonebreakers, a substitute for his brush. The woman next to him, in a mirror-position to Degas' own body, is the feminine half of the artist's mind and indicates its androgyny.
Reproduction is a high-quality eco-ink printing on an Italian canvas. For smaller sizes, the image is wrapped on a hard back, and at the larger ones - stretched on a subframe. You get it arranged with a suitable frame.
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