Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)

Dufy had experimented with the subject of horse races as early as 1913. His first paddock works were highly stylised watercolours, focussing on the audience of élégantes, dandies and jockeys attending the courses at Deauville. In the 1930s, with his discovery of the race courses at Epsom and Ascot, Dufy's compositions became more ambitious, as in the present work, in which Dufy captures the electric moment of the race itself, concentrating fully on the thrill of the race with a unique immediacy and panache.

Seen from a bird’s eye view, the pounding horses have an iconic quality which echoes all the way back to the wild horses of the Lascaux caves. Their vivid, ochre-brown is broken by the angular figures of the jockeys, mostly outlined in a rich blue. The famous grandstand at Epsom is also concentrated into a series of fierce horizontal and vertical lines, its geometry contrasting with the free-flowing animals. Dufy perfectly captures the excitement of the race and the exhilaration of watching these high-bred creatures move effortlessly through space.