At the Races in the Countryside

Beginnings

Edgar Degas

At the Races in the Countryside

1869

Oil on canvas, 36.5 × 55.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A Normandy family outing that mixes landscape, everyday scene and family portrait. Degas included this small canvas among his 1874 entries.

  • The man at the reins is Degas's friend Paul Valpinçon, with his wife, baby son and wet nurse.
  • Degas pushes the race into the distance and leaves the middle empty, like a passing glance. Impressionist painters often aimed for this unposed, glimpsed look.
  • Look for the carriage cropped at the edge and the family dog echoing its master's pose.
  • The MFA points out that the wet nurse sets paid work beside leisure.
  • The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure owned it in 1874; the MFA bought it in 1926.

Horse racing was a fashionable pastime for the French upper classes, in Paris and the provinces. Well-off families commonly hired wet nurses.

wet nurse
A woman paid to breastfeed another family's baby.

Image: Google Art Project · Public domain

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