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The False Start
Edgar Degas French
Not on view
Here, Degas positions his viewer in the center of the track, looking over at the spectators in the shaded stands. After a false start, the jockey in the foreground struggles to restrain his horse so that he can return to the starting line. Before Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographic series documenting animal locomotion demonstrated that a galloping horse pulls in its limbs when it leaves the ground, painters remained faithful to pictorial convention that presents the animal in a kind of flight, with legs apart and outstretched. Degas began modeling sculptures of horses in wax around the time this painting was made.
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