Jockeys and Race Horses

Jockeys and Race Horses, dated to around 1890 and now at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, is a late racecourse work from a period when Degas was increasingly working from memory and earlier studies rather than direct observation. By 1890 his eyesight had deteriorated significantly, but the late racing works paradoxically acquire a new visual power through their simplification. The figures of horses and riders are distilled to essential forms — the characteristic shapes that decades of observation had embedded in his visual memory. These late works approach the pure formal abstraction of the horse and rider as a compositional unit, anticipating the twentieth century's interest in pure form over descriptive accuracy.

The late technique shows increased boldness and simplification: horses are rendered as powerful formal masses rather than anatomically precise studies. Degas's color in these later racecourse works tends toward heightened saturation — vivid greens of turf, deeper blues of sky — that compensates for the reduced spatial subtlety. The jockeys' colored silks provide compositional punctuation. The overall effect is of concentrated energy and formal assurance rather than the careful observation of his earlier racing subjects.