The Races at Longchamp
This conversation is connected to The Races at Longchamp.
Manet painted The Races at Longchamp in 1866. Horses charge directly toward the viewer, jockeys in colored silks, the crowd packed along both sides of the track in a blur of black and white. The Longchamp racecourse had opened in the Bois de Boulogne in 1857, and by the 1860s it was one of the essential social events of Parisian life — a place to see and be seen as much as to watch horses. Manet, Degas, and later Toulouse-Lautrec all painted the races. The composition here is unusual for the period: the horses come at you head-on, compressed and foreshortened, with the green of the Bois de Boulogne and a church spire rising behind. The painting is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.