The Parade

The Parade (also known as Before the Races), painted around 1866-68 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, is one of the most ambitious and spatially innovative of Degas's early racing subjects. The painting depicts the parade of horses before the race — the formal procession around the track that allows the crowd to assess the competitors before betting — with a high horizon and a wide panoramic sweep that creates an almost abstract band of color across the upper third of the canvas. The composition was radical for its time: a deliberately flattened, horizontal arrangement that recalled Japanese woodblock prints and anticipated late nineteenth-century abstraction. Degas shows horses moving away from the viewer, their backs and hindquarters rather than their faces presented.

The flattening of pictorial space through a high horizon line is the composition's defining structural principle, giving the painting an almost decorative quality at odds with conventional landscape organization. The horses are shown from varied angles — some in profile, some retreating — creating a rhythmic horizontal movement. The color is dry and high-keyed for outdoor light. Degas renders the horses with anatomical precision while the distant crowd and landscape become near-abstraction.