Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Racing inside a city
Most turf pictures in this register are filed under rural or field headings: the course sits in open country and the crowd travels to it. This one is filed under urban and river headings alongside Animal Art > Horse, and the title names a park. That combination describes a different institution. When a racecourse is inside a metropolitan park, the fixture becomes part of the city's leisure timetable rather than a destination, and the animal's paid competitive work is performed for an audience that walked there.
What the record holds
The date of creation is 1872 and the location is the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The dimensions are 73 x 92 cm. Realism is the recorded style and French the nationality attached to the painter. The measured colour family of the image is ochre.
A convention this register keeps naming
Painters of the turf before instantaneous photography drew the gallop as a single stretched leap, forelegs thrown forward and hind legs thrown back, with all four feet clear of the ground. It is a pictorial habit rather than a description of how the animal moves, and it is worth knowing before reading any racing picture of this period. This entry states the convention; it makes no claim about what is in this particular image, which it has not seen.
Sources
1 references- Manet, Edouard — Getty ULAN
French painter, printmaker, and draftsman, 1832-1883
