The Jockey (1899): Art, History and Details

The Jockey (1899) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901).

The work and its context

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

Motivated by the popularity of the races, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec executed this lithograph both in color, seen here, and in black and white. He intended to publish the color version in a portfolio of horse-racing subjects, but the project never came to fruition and Jockey was published alone. The artist's admiration for Edgar Degas's horse-racing pictures is clear in Jockey, and he shared Degas's appreciation of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Particular elements of the lithograph reveal the influence of the Japanese woodcut: the overall flatness; the daring cropping—particularly of the background horse whose head and hindquarters have been omitted; the pale green hue of the grass and the blue-violet sky; and the dramatic, rushing perspective of the horses galloping into the distance. However, the younger artist incorporated the Japanese aesthetic into his own visual language in an entirely original way. Unlike Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec ignored Eadweard Muybridge's photographs and depicted his horse and rider in the physically impossible "flying-gallop" position.

Object facts

• Title: The Jockey
• Date: 1899
• Creator attribution: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)
• Culture: France, late 19th Century
• Type: Print
• Technique: color lithograph
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1967.234

A detail from the museum

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec set this print at an identifiable race track, at Longchamps in Paris's Bois de Boulougne.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Prasse Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

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.