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Lot Essay
Depicting a spirited thoroughbred walking at a jaunty clip, the ears upright and alert, Cheval marchant au pas relevé is the culminating work in a sequence of three equine sculptures that Degas created in the early 1870s, all of which explore the ambulatory gait (on the date, see Degas at the Races, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, pp. 186-188). This sculpture—the liveliest and most active in the group—captures the horse with two opposing hooves lifted off the ground and the head tossed lightly to the side, recalling the gamboling chargers on the Parthenon frieze, the bronze horses of Saint Mark’s, and Verrocchio’s mount of Colleoni.
The first of Degas’s sculpted horses that fully breaks from a static, earthbound posture to investigate the muscular tension and shifting weight needed to move through space, Cheval marchant au pas relevé anticipates the dynamic and boldly experimental series of trotting, prancing, rearing, balking, and galloping steeds that Degas would model during the 1880s, following the publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s revolutionary stop-action photographs. “Four-legged ballerinas dancing en pointe outdoors,” the poet Paul Valéry called Degas’s complex, varied investigations of horse gaits, likening them to his contemporaneous studies of dancers in motion (quoted in S. G. Lindsay et al., Edgar Degas Sculpture, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2010, p. 64).
A long-time habitué of the racetrack at Longchamps and an adept horseman himself, Degas lavished great care in Cheval marchant au pas relevé on the rippling musculature of the horse, which complements the animal’s dynamic posture by heightening the impression of vitality. The tendons in the neck and legs, the bulging jowls, and the powerful, sinewy muscles in the haunches are all carefully articulated, calling to mind Théodore Géricault’s famed flayed horse in a similar pose, while the finely worked head—the nostrils flaring and the mouth slightly open as though resisting a bit—conveys an arresting sense of intense emotion and psychological life. Unlike contemporary animalier sculptors such as Emmanuel Frémiet, however, who favored the laborious reproduction of tiny anatomical details, Degas pioneered a looser and more “painterly” handling, reflecting his growing assurance in his craft and his passionate enthusiasm for his equine subject matter. As late as 1888, nearly two decades later, Degas could still write, exhilarated, to his friend and fellow artist Albert Bartholomé, “Happy sculptor...I have not yet made enough horses!” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 197).
The first of Degas’s sculpted horses that fully breaks from a static, earthbound posture to investigate the muscular tension and shifting weight needed to move through space, Cheval marchant au pas relevé anticipates the dynamic and boldly experimental series of trotting, prancing, rearing, balking, and galloping steeds that Degas would model during the 1880s, following the publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s revolutionary stop-action photographs. “Four-legged ballerinas dancing en pointe outdoors,” the poet Paul Valéry called Degas’s complex, varied investigations of horse gaits, likening them to his contemporaneous studies of dancers in motion (quoted in S. G. Lindsay et al., Edgar Degas Sculpture, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2010, p. 64).
A long-time habitué of the racetrack at Longchamps and an adept horseman himself, Degas lavished great care in Cheval marchant au pas relevé on the rippling musculature of the horse, which complements the animal’s dynamic posture by heightening the impression of vitality. The tendons in the neck and legs, the bulging jowls, and the powerful, sinewy muscles in the haunches are all carefully articulated, calling to mind Théodore Géricault’s famed flayed horse in a similar pose, while the finely worked head—the nostrils flaring and the mouth slightly open as though resisting a bit—conveys an arresting sense of intense emotion and psychological life. Unlike contemporary animalier sculptors such as Emmanuel Frémiet, however, who favored the laborious reproduction of tiny anatomical details, Degas pioneered a looser and more “painterly” handling, reflecting his growing assurance in his craft and his passionate enthusiasm for his equine subject matter. As late as 1888, nearly two decades later, Degas could still write, exhilarated, to his friend and fellow artist Albert Bartholomé, “Happy sculptor...I have not yet made enough horses!” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 197).