Studio Interior with "The Steeplechase" (Aux Courses, Le Jockey Blesse)

Edgar Degas received a thorough academic art education. He studied with a pupil of Ingres and completed the course at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Initially, he attempted a traditional kind of historical painting, but soon found this genre unsatisfactory. By 1874 he had already participated in and helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition. Like the other Impressionists, Degas drew his themes from contemporary subjects, with a clear emphasis in his case on modern urban motifs. His paintings, however, differ from those of his avant-garde colleagues in a number of ways: he rarely painted landscapes; he preferred scenes set in artificial light; he emphasized drawing; he created most of his works in his studio rather than out of doors. As is evident from his earliest historical paintings, horses fascinated Degas from the onset of his career. This preoccupation developed into a lifelong interest in the subject of the racecourse. An early example of this was a painting entitled Scene from the Steeplechase: the Fallen Jockey, a large canvas exhibited in the official Salon of 1866, which reflected his desire to give monumental status to a modern subject. Exactly how this work looked at the time it was first shown is not known, as Degas reworked it at least twice, once ca. 1880–1881 and again ca. 1897, adding to and changing it considerably.Studio Interior with “The Steeplechase” is most certainly related to the 1866 Steeplechase, but its dating and what it represents remain enigmatic. It is possible that this work, formerly thought to have been executed around the same time as The Steeplechase, perhaps as a study for it, may actually be a view of the interior of Degas’s studio done some years later. Jean Boggs suggests that it may have been painted at a date congruent with an offer, made around 1880 by Mary Cassatt’s brother, to purchase The Steeplechase. The stylistic evidence seems to bear out this interpretation. It is possible, therefore, that Degas made this oil sketch, the major portion of which is devoted to a depiction of The Steeplechase, in order either to have a record of the original composition or of the reworking he was doing on it at that time. In our work, a version of The Steeplechase painting dominates some two thirds of the composition. Toward the lower right a blue-gray area suggests the back of a spectator. Two additional works hang above on the wall at the right. The drawing on the far right is a sketch for what appears to be one of the mounted jockeys in The Steeplechase. The other shows the outline of a standing nude over a green-gray background. By and large Studio Interior is brushed in broad, quick strokes of diluted paint. In the painting-within-a-painting Degas took more care with the articulation of the jockeys and horses, but dealt with the landscape in a relatively flat, perfunctory manner.