Horse and Rider (c. 1890): Art, History and Details

Horse and Rider (c. 1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Degas’s drawing Gentleman Rider alludes to the steeplechase, a fashionable race in which the riders were not professional jockeys but, instead, “gentlemen.” Here, Degas demonstrated his unceasing interest in the horse’s anatomy in motion, playfully revising the position of the animal’s hind legs, as he would a dancer’s. The top-hatted rider remains a ghostly shadow—it is clearly the horse rather than its rider who captured the artist’s imagination.

Object facts

• Title: Horse and Rider
• Date: c. 1890
• Creator attribution: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 29.5 x 24.3 cm (11 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2009.123

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.