Cleveland Museum of Art

Horse and Rider

Edgar Degas

Date

c. 1890

Medium

black chalk

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Degas’s drawing Gentleman Rider alludes to the steeplechase, a fashionable race in which the riders were not professional jockeys but, instead, “gentlemen.” Here, Degas demonstrated his unceasing interest in the horse’s anatomy in motion, playfully revising the position of the animal’s hind legs, as he would a dancer’s. The top-hatted rider remains a ghostly shadow—it is clearly the horse rather than its rider who captured the artist’s imagination.

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