The Races at Longchamp

The Races at Longchamp by Édouard Manet: This freely executed painting captures the thrilling conclusion of a horse race at Longchamp, located at the Bois de B…

What to notice

Track the race from the compressed horses to the streaked crowd and rail; Manet sacrifices individual detail to make speed dominate the horizontal canvas.

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This freely executed painting captures the thrilling conclusion of a horse race at Longchamp, located at the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris. Here, Édouard Manet radically departed from conventional representations of the sport, in which races were shown from the side with the horses in profile. Instead, the competitors gallop thunderously toward the viewer, raising a cloud of turf, their pace underlined by the sweeping diagonals of the racetrack fences. In France, horse racing became an important fo…