The Races at Longchamp by Édouard Manet

The fences sweep towards a knot of horses and riders, then the movement comes straight back at us. Brown legs cross against the green track; small patches of yellow, blue and pale pink distinguish the jockeys. On either side, spectators press towards the rails. Manet puts the viewer close to the race’s forward rush while leaving room for a whole afternoon’s spectacle around it.

The Races at Longchamp belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, which dates it to 1866.^[1] Its broad landscape format contains a striking combination of space and compression. The approaching pack feels immediate, yet it is surrounded by crowds, trees, distant hills and an expansive sky. Related works reveal how differently Manet could balance those elements.

Horses Coming towards the Viewer

The racing group stands just to the right of the painting’s centre. Six jockeys can be picked out above the horses’ overlapping bodies, their small heads and coloured clothing forming an irregular line. Below them, the animals’ dark legs stretch, bend and cross. Their combined shape is easier to grasp at first than the precise position of each horse.

That difference between the group and its individual parts helps create the sense of speed. Looking from one horse to another requires a little effort. A leg that seems to belong to one body may be crossed by another; a dark neck disappears briefly against a rider or a patch of trees. The eye keeps adjusting as it follows the pack.

The horses are also unevenly spaced. One at the right has more green track around its legs and flank, while those nearer the centre overlap more closely. A pale passage on a horse’s face catches the light; elsewhere, brown and black shapes merge. Those intervals of separation and congestion prevent the group from becoming a neat row of repeated silhouettes.

Above it, the jockeys supply a different kind of rhythm. Their coloured caps and jackets can be recognised more quickly than the moving limbs below. Blue at the right, a pale pinkish figure nearer the middle and yellow further back become points of orientation within the darker mass. Colour helps us find our way through the movement.

The approach is the picture’s decisive choice. Conventional sporting images often showed a race from the side, allowing the horses’ profiles and the order of the field to be read across the canvas. The Art Institute draws attention to Manet’s departure from that arrangement.^[1] Here, foreshortening makes the bodies more compact, and the track seems to deliver the whole group towards our position.

It is a pictorial position with an exciting instability. We look along the rails as spectators might, yet the horses appear to be bearing towards the space immediately in front of us. The painting gives that sensation without needing to account for a safe physical place from which someone could have watched or painted it.

The Crowd along the Rails

The left fence begins very close to the lower edge. Pale blue-grey posts rise through a succession of short verticals, joined by a long horizontal rail. As the fence recedes, those intervals grow smaller and less distinct. The barrier guides our eye away from the foreground women and towards the riders.

At the near left, one woman wears blue, while another is surrounded by pale beige and grey fabric and the rounded shapes of headwear and a parasol. Their substantial forms give this corner a slower pace. The eye can pause over the dark trim of a garment or the arc of the parasol before returning to the horses.

Behind them, spectators and carriages accumulate in a much denser pattern. Dark hats alternate with bright dabs suggesting faces, fabric or reflected light. Some figures are raised above their neighbours, making the crowd rise and fall in uneven tiers. A man high at the left holds binoculars to his eyes, a detail also noted in the museum’s commentary.^[1]

His concentrated act of looking makes a small counterpart to our own. The race is the obvious attraction, but Manet gives us several ways to watch it: through the oncoming group, through the converging fences and through a spectator who brings the action closer with an optical instrument. The picture is full of people directing their attention beyond themselves.

On the right, the crowd forms a lower, darker band. Its figures are smaller and more compressed. A long warm-brown roof enters from the edge above them, making a firm horizontal shape against the loose vegetation. Between that structure and the near left spectators, the two sides have distinctly different weights.

This imbalance keeps the painting lively. The left side offers the greatest variety of people and near objects; the right leaves more open track around the racing group. The rails connect both crowds to the action, so that the social gathering and the horses remain parts of one continuous scene.

A Ring above the Distant Hill

A tall post rises left of centre, ending in a circular ring against the hill and sky. The Art Institute identifies it as the post marking the finish.^[1] Its shape is exceptionally clear within a painting whose smaller figures can be difficult to separate. The ring can be seen almost at a glance.

The post also complicates our experience of depth. Its narrow upright belongs beside the fence, but its circular top meets the distant horizon. Following it upwards carries the eye from the crowded track to the broad green hill without an intervening stretch of empty space. Near and far become briefly joined by one dark line.

Other verticals answer it across the canvas. Slender trees stand to the right of the pack; thicker trunks and foliage rise behind the riders. Against them, the distant hills run in low, sloping bands, while the fences cut much steeper diagonals through the lower part of the picture.

The opposing directions create both recession and resistance. The rails lead into depth, but the post, tree shapes and roof keep declaring themselves as forms spread across a flat surface. It is possible to feel the long reach of the track and, almost immediately, to see a pattern of verticals, diagonals and coloured bands.

The sky opens out above this compressed middle distance. Cream and grey clouds are interrupted by brighter blue strokes, with changes of direction that remain plainly visible. Its broad area gives the painting air and scale. Below it, the dark trees form a concentrated backdrop from which the little coloured jockeys emerge.

Paint that Holds the Movement

The handling changes as the subject changes. Long passages of green and blue-green stretch across the foreground track. The fence posts require shorter, more upright marks. In the crowd, pale touches and dark strokes collide, suggesting a large gathering without describing every face.

The horses occupy a more difficult middle ground between recognisable bodies and broken paint. Their heads, necks and legs must be legible enough to convey the race, but they also need to belong to a moving group. Some contours are strongly marked; others disappear into neighbouring forms or the darker background.

The tree immediately behind the pack has a broad, sweeping silhouette. Deep green is crossed by lighter strokes, giving its surface an active rhythm of its own. At the right, the narrow trees rise in more separate, tapering forms. Their relative stillness makes the racing bodies below seem more restless.

Seen close up, these marks can interrupt the illusion of a continuous world. Seen together, they make that world cohere. The blue garment at the left, the pale fence and the jockeys’ jackets are particularly effective examples: each consists of conspicuous touches that settle into a recognisable form as the eye moves across the painting.

The apparent immediacy should not be confused with proof of a single rapid sitting. What the picture makes us feel is the brief excitement of the race. Its surviving relatives and the questions about its changing format point to a more extended engagement with the subject.

Longchamp and Fashionable Paris

Longchamp was a relatively new setting for this kind of public spectacle. France Galop’s history records the first meeting on 27 April 1857, attended by Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. The Grand Prix de Paris followed in 1863.^[2] Located in the Bois de Boulogne, the racecourse became part of the changing geography of Parisian leisure.

The painting gives the gathering almost as much attention as the contest. People arrive in carriages, stand above one another or crowd against the rails. Hats, parasols and contrasting clothes make their own display. The excitement of the race occurs within a setting designed to attract and accommodate a public.

Manet’s treatment allows that public to remain varied without turning each figure into a separate anecdote. A few near spectators are substantial enough to command attention; most resolve into an animated collective presence. The crowd gives the event its scale, while the small number of riders provides a concentrated centre of action.

A drawing by Edgar Degas offers a separate glimpse of Manet within such a gathering. In Édouard Manet at the Races, dated about 1868–69, Degas placed him among spectators. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the sheet, suggests that Degas may have been planning a painting.^[3] It is a later image of Manet as an observer, rather than evidence for the particular race represented in the Chicago canvas.

The Wider Scene on Paper

A related work in Harvard’s Fogg Museum presents the race within a considerably wider panorama. Dated 1864, it combines watercolour and gouache over graphite on two joined sheets of paper, measuring 22.1 × 56.4 cm.^[4] A visible division left of centre is a reminder of that unusual physical format.

The left side contains much more space for arrivals and spectators. A mounted man appears near a carriage whose large wheels and dark body establish a solid foreground presence. Taller blue-clad figures rise above it. Nearby, two women stand close to the fence, their dresses occupying more room than the comparable foreground figures in the Chicago painting.

The race itself is pushed further towards the right. The jockeys remain recognisable as small coloured accents, but the surrounding social scene has greater independence. A viewer can spend time with the carriage, its horses and the standing women before reaching the moving pack.

Several motifs connect the paper work with the oil: the fence narrowing into distance, the ring-topped post, the low hill, the trees and the roof at the right. Their proportions and relations change. In the watercolour, the long foreground rail helps divide a broad gathering from the open track; in Chicago, it seems to drive more insistently towards the approaching horses.

The paper work’s precise role remains disputed. Theodore Reff regarded it as a preparatory colour study, while recording an alternative proposal that it copied a larger oil.^[5] Its wider view is therefore valuable as a related arrangement, without having to be treated as an exact blueprint for the extant Chicago canvas.

A Date and a Changing Composition

The Art Institute describes its painting as a canvas cut down by Manet from a much larger composition.^[1] That physical history adds another dimension to the concentrated view. The painting’s present edges belong to the way the work has come down to us, and they matter to the balance between crowd, track and horses.

Reconstructing its relationship to other racing pictures has produced different accounts. In 1982, Reff argued that the Chicago canvas was a separate study, questioning its proposed connection as a fragment of an earlier picture. He considered differences of handling and repeated spectator groups, and suggested a relationship with a lost larger work exhibited in 1867. His catalogue accordingly dated Chicago to about 1867.^[5]

Those arguments show why the works cannot simply be fitted together by matching a horse or a group of spectators. Manet could repeat a motif as well as alter an existing image. Similarity may indicate a continuing design problem, while the identification of an actual fragment requires a different kind of evidence.

The inscription provides a more specific point of reference. Malcolm Park reports that an examination at the Art Institute in October 2006, using microscopy and X-radiographs, reached agreement that its date reads 1866. Park distinguished that reading from his own proposed later chronology for the painting.^[4] The museum currently catalogues the canvas as 1866.^[1]

Reading the numerals and dating every alteration are separate questions. An inscription can be examined directly, while a sequence of reworkings may have to be argued from several kinds of evidence. The date supplies an anchor; it does not by itself map every stage through which the composition passed.

The Race in Lithography

Manet also carried the subject into The Races, a lithograph. The Metropolitan Museum’s impression is dated 1865–72, published in 1884, and described as the third state of three. Its image measures 38.7 × 51.1 cm.^[6] The publication date thus belongs after Manet’s death, while the design was developed earlier.

The broad arrangement runs in the opposite direction to the Chicago oil. The thickest crowd occupies the right, and the racing group approaches from left of centre. A rail extends diagonally from the lower right towards the horses. Beyond it, the ring-topped post and dark trees provide points of recognition within a different distribution of space.

The print’s most striking passage is the crowd at the near right. Repeated loops, slashes and broad black marks accumulate over figures, carriage shapes and the fence. Individual forms are difficult to hold apart. The activity of drawing becomes almost another spectacle, as energetic in its way as the race.

Across the track, the handling opens out. The horses stand against larger pale areas, while lighter lines suggest hills and clouds above them. Those differences give the sheet a strong contrast between crowded darkness and open paper. In the oil, colour helps distribute attention across the picture; here, the weight and density of black marks take on much of that task.

The sky is particularly revealing. A few large arcs and groups of slanting strokes suggest clouds without the continuous paint of the canvas. The paper remains active around and between them. Similarly, the track can be established by scattered horizontal marks and the pressure of the enclosing rails.

Looking between the print and the oil makes it clear how much a subject can change with its medium. The horses’ forward movement survives, as do several architectural and landscape motifs, but their effects are rebuilt through different marks. The lithograph rewards attention as a related design with its own balance of light and dark.

From Paris to Chicago

According to the Art Institute’s provenance, Manet sold the painting to Émile Théodore Delius in 1877. It passed through Durand-Ruel to the Chicago collector Potter Palmer in June 1896, then descended within the Palmer family before being given to the museum in 1922.^[1]

Its relatively small physical scale remains part of the experience. The canvas is less than a metre wide, yet its rails open a long avenue and its crowded edges suggest a large public event. The approaching horses briefly dominate that space. Their tangled legs and small bright jackets give the expansive scene a sharp point of contact with the person looking at it.