 Hi everybody. Welcome to Barns Takeout. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barns. And today we're going to talk about a painting by Edgar Doga called Jockeys and Race Horses. It was done probably in the early 1890s. Jockeys and Race Horses is one of 45 oil paintings that Doga made of horses and racers. He also did lots of prints and drawings and actually some sculptures of this subject. So it was a theme that really sort of concerned him throughout his career. Before we get into looking at this specific painting, I want to give you a little bit of context. Like the other Impressionists, Doga is known for capturing contemporary life in Paris during a time of massive change. You had the Industrial Revolution, the ballooning of the population of the city of Paris, physical changes to the city, the massive growth of the middle class, and with that growth, the explosion of all these new leisure activities all around the city that people would partake in. And this is one of the things that the Impressionists painted, the Cafés, the Ballet, the Café Cancerre, boating on the river, and this horse racing. But racing on a fixed track with a set of rules didn't take hold until the 1830s. And once it did, it became really popular. And by the mid-19th century, horse races were an extremely popular leisure activity, especially for upper class men. And Doga was very comfortable with that crowd. He was from a wealthy banking family. There were several racetracks in Paris at the time that Doga was working. The most famous racetrack of the day was Long Champ. And it was built in 1857 in the Bois de Boulogne, which is a large park on the west side of Paris. And it was and is a very, very elegant place. Race Day at Long Champ was a spectacle. So people would turn out in their, you know, their, the latest fashions and they would bring their very fancy kind of decorated carriages. And it was a thing to sort of go and to see and be seen, and to see, you know, the who's who in the crowd at the, at the horse races, just like at the opera or at the ballet. And Manet, Doga's contemporary, did several paintings of the horse races at this, at the track called Long Champ. And Manet's paintings show that crowd, you know, so you can sort of pick out some of the fashions. And they also show the horses, the actual race. So the horses kind of coming at you. And so what's, what's interesting, when we start looking at this is what Doga does. He does not show you that crowd. He doesn't show you the actual race. And this is very typical of, of all of his horse racing pictures. Only rarely does he show you the actual race. Mostly he's focusing on these sort of downtime moments, the kind of moment before the race where the jockeys are kind of lining up or starting to congregate. And so you can see three horses and jockeys here. There's one coming up here, it looks like, from the left. And it's just interesting that he does this because horse races are such a place of high drama and high tension. And he's, he's choosing the moment where there, there isn't a lot of drama. And it, the horse racing scenes are often compared to his ballet scenes, I think with, with very good reason. Because with, with the ballet scenes too, you know, sometimes he shows you the ballerina on stage. And you can get a glimpse of the, of the audience. But most of the time in the ballet scenes, what he's showing you is the backstage, the, the sort of mundane moments, the ballerina is lacing up their shoes or adjusting their straps or stretching. And that's really so much of what his project as an artist was about, showing you the small, ordinary moments of life, you know, those moments that don't ordinarily make it into a painting at the time. And there was a certain amount of truth in these moments. The location of Duga's horse racing paintings are often vague. You know, I just spent a minute talking about Longchamp. But we can't say for sure where this, where this race, where this picture is, where this scene is located. He just doesn't give enough information. The background is very vague. These wisps of smoke coming up here, these are almost certainly smokestacks. There are other horse racing scenes that Duga made where you can clearly see the smokestacks. But having these smokestacks doesn't really help us with the location because they could be seen from multiple different locations and several racetracks. And he really doesn't tell us that much about the riders either. You know, if you look closely, this guy's face is sort of blank, no features at all. This guy's head is blocked, his head is turned away. So we don't get a sense of the sort of nervousness of the riders, any sense of emotion. He's just not interested in that. He's much more interested in the movement of the figures and in the relationships between them. So look at the movement that's going on here. You get there's movement happening in several directions at once. This horse is kind of moving forward as is the jockey. At the same time, this one is pulling back as is the jockey. And then in this one, the movement is in both directions. The horse is kind of going forward. This guy is going backward. Look down at the hooves. He's clearly interested in showing that these horses are not just stationary. He is studying the way that horses move. And he kind of paints this flurry of legs down here to kind of show you that movement. And then when you look over here at this section, these are this horse's front legs. And he kind of makes them very faint as if they are in motion, blurry. I think that also, if you look here, the musculature, he is showing you the musculature on the bodies of the horses or this horse at least. And I think that also helps to convey a sense of motion. And it's interesting that some of the heads are blocked because this is the way that things look in real life. In real life, things aren't perfectly framed all the time. So that's part of Doga's interest in naturalism. But at the same time that there's this kind of compositional chaos with movement happening in several directions, there's also this sense of harmony. There's a sense of balance. The horses are centered. They are sort of held by the landscape. There is a distribution of color, especially the white of the pants, like boom, boom, boom. Kind of holding the picture together. So the way that Doga worked, he actually, he went to the races, he made sketches there, and then he would come back to the studio and finish the works there. And often he would shuffle and the poses and kind of recombine them to make the paintings. But by the 1880s, he was also making use of stop action photography by Edward Moybridge, the English slash American photographer, that had famously captured frame by frame movements of a galloping horse, movements that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. And so Doga studied these photographs by Moybridge, which were published in lots of places, including in French publications. And he studied these photos and he actually made wax sculptures after some of them. And he also drew from or he sort of took from earlier art. So he studied Renaissance art. He studied Renaissance depictions of horses riding into battle. He went to the Louvre and sketched copies of them. He made a copy of one of the horses in the famous Parthenon frieze. And sometimes you can match up the poses of his horses with the poses in some of these older paintings. And so what Doga is doing here is he's taking a traditional subject horses with riders. You see them throughout the history of European art military pictures. And he makes that subject modern by recasting horses and riders as a very new and a very real part of contemporary life. And look then what he does technically when you look closely at this painting from a distance, it looks like things are sort of maybe kind of blurry but sort of neatly contained within their outlines. But as soon as you start to look up close, you can see how much is going on in every single inch of this painting. There the layers of paint that he is applying are so complicated and it gets really messy. So let's look see the paint just moving in all sorts of different directions. See the different layers this this orange kind of dabbed on top of the red. This sort of yellowish green sort of dragged through the others. He's often in these sort of scratchier parts. The paint looks kind of scratchy. He's using a dry brush. So I'm going to stop there. Please come see this painting. The barns is now open again. Yay. And if you're interested in learning more about Doga, I'm going to be teaching a course, an online course at the barns, a four week course starting in October. So please check out our website and thank you for listening. I'm Tom Collins, New Bauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.