Cheval en marche

Degas first produced sculptures of horses in wax and clay in the late 1860s, deriving the theme from racing scenes, which he had begun to paint earlier in the decade. By using horses as one of his principle sculptural subjects, Degas was not simply continuing a preoccupation of his work in other media nor responding to cultural and personal pressures, but placing himself squarely in a position to explore problems of first importance to those seeking a new sculptural grammar. If his early horses were statically posed and academically conceived, they were naturalistically observed and hence modern in intent. Paul Gsell goes on to remark that "by the elegance of their slender proportions, by the stiltlike elongation of their legs, they lastingly realize the ultramodern type of the race horse" (C.W. Millard, op. cit., p. 97).