Deux chevaux au pâturage

Edgar Degas is best known for his ballet dancers, his racetrack scenes, and his pastels of women bathing. But he also painted horses outside the context of sport — standing in fields, grazing, unobserved. Deux chevaux au pâturage (Two Horses at Pasture) dates to around 1871. Two chestnut horses stand close together on a green field, heads down, grazing. Their bodies are outlined in dark strokes and filled with warm orange-brown, overlapping slightly so the smaller horse is partially obscured behind the larger one. A thin band of orange light sits at the horizon, with a gray-lavender sky and a soft mauve cloud above. Degas's red signature is in the lower left corner. The composition is vertical, which is unusual for a landscape — the horses fill the lower two-thirds and the sky takes the rest.