Souvenir of Auteuil

A fixture remembered rather than reported

Auteuil is a Paris racecourse, and the word placed in front of it — Souvenir — frames the picture as recollection. That framing matters in a register that keeps asking what a picture is evidence of. A racing scene titled as a memory is not offering itself as a record of a meeting; it is offering the meeting as something already past. The animal's function is still competitive, but the picture's claim on the reader has moved from report to keepsake.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1881 as the date of creation and a private collection as the location. No dimensions are recorded. Impressionism is the style term and French the nationality attached to the painter. The categories carry landscape and field headings and group portraiture alongside Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour families of the image are yellow and green.

One year, eight works

Eight of this painter's twenty entries in the present register carry the date 1881, and between them they cover the racecourse, a tethered animal, a yoked draught pair, a falconer and a horse fighting its handler. A single year in a single catalogue, running across most of the functions this register sorts by. That is a fact about the holdings; it is not a claim about how the year was spent.