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Lot Essay
Edgar Degas's Enfants et poneys dans un parc holds a treasured position within the collection of Lorinda Payson de Roulet. This painting was given to Joan Whitney Payson by her parents on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. In many ways, this painting can be seen to mark the start of the extraordinary collecting journey that Payson undertook over the course of her life. The subject matter of Enfants et poneys dans un parc no doubt held a special resonance for the Whitney Payson family. Payson's parents, Payne and Helen Hay Whitney, were the owners of Greentree Stable, one of the most successful family thoroughbred racing and breeding stables in the country. Joan and her brother John Hay Whitney later inherited the stables, remaining devoted to racing throughout their lives.
Like many of Degas's early modern masterpieces, Enfants et poneys dans un parc, painted circa 1867, combines solid draftsmanship and a bold handling of paint with the radical compositional devices, including obfuscation and abrupt foreshortening, that would come to define the artist's unique form of Impressionist art. It is, in the words of the former director of the Musee d'Orsay, and curator of the landmark 1988-1989 retrospective of the artist, Henri Loyrette, “a deliberately ambiguous canvas, loaded with meaning” (quoted in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 146). An early horse scene, this work reflects Degas's defining subjects--along with ballet dancers and bathers--and his signature wit and sharp eye for human behavior.
[Degas’s] horse-and-rider pictures of the 1860s remained one of his most original achievements and the surest sign of his shifting ambition.
Richard Kendall
The young subjects of Degas’s painting are all dressed in the same gray jackets and skirts with black ribboned hats, but they display varying levels of horseback riding skill. The oldest girl, in the upper left corner, sits confidently astride her chestnut-brown pony, who leaps over a row of flowers with ease. The middle child and her pony have become stuck in that same flowerbed; they face in the opposite direction, faces obscured. Meanwhile, the youngest, standing in the lower right, struggles to command her steed: a reluctant black donkey who lies down on the grass, making direct eye-contact with the viewer. The little girl digs her heels into the dirt and tugs at the donkey's reins, but to no avail. Her frustration—and the animal's reciprocal stubbornness—was clearly a source of amusement to the artist. The unruly white goat or lamb running in the background further enhances the levity of the scene.
The young female horseback riders in Enfants et poneys dans un parc prefigure another important subject in Degas’s oeuvre: ballerinas at the Parisian Opéra. Indeed, Degas’s first painting of the ballet, Portrait de Mlle Fiocre à propos du ballet “La Source” (Lemoisne, no. 146; Brooklyn Museum of Art), is also dated to the late 1860s. Just as the three young equestriennes wear matching riding habits, Degas's young ballerinas often wear matching tutus. In the same way, Degas’s riders display a range of different movements, from an elegant gallop to being stuck in the mud; similarly, some of Degas’s ballerinas twirl and arabesque, while others assume clumsy, more realistic poses out of exhaustion or boredom. Importantly, Degas’s equestriennes are set outdoors, while his ballerinas dance against artificial landscapes, painted on two-dimensional stage sets.
The landscape represented in Enfants et poneys dans un parc may be a Parisian public park like the Bois de Boulogne, a popular site of bourgeois recreation in the Second Empire. This theory is supported by the fact that, in the 1860s, Degas began painting professional jockeys and horses at the Longchamp race track there. Several other modern French artists also painted amateur equestriennes in the Bois de Boulogne. Those amazones, as they were known in the late nineteenth century, are clad in fashionable riding habits and top hats. Degas’s contemporaries also pictured these figures, for example, Edouard Manet's L’Amazone (Portrait of Marie Lefébure), 1870-1875 (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1873 work, La promenade au bois de Boulogne (Hamburger Kunsthalle). The American painter Mary Cassatt, who was known to ride horses in the Bois de Boulogne, shared Degas’s interest in playful depictions of children in the park. She painted her older sister, Lydia Cassatt, driving Degas’s little niece in a horse-drawn carriage in the 1881, Woman and Child Driving (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
The Degas scholar Jean Sutherland Boggs, author of the 1998 Degas at the Races exhibition catalogue, posited that the setting of Enfants et poneys dans un parc is not a public park, but rather a private country estate—similar to Ménil-Hubert, the home of Degas’s childhood friend, Paul Valpinçon. Boggs has also suggested that the younger girl may have been modeled after Valpinçon’s only daughter, Hortense, who was about six years old at the time this work was executed. In the late 1860s, Degas produced a smaller painting, La promenade à cheval (Lemoisne, no. 117; Hiroshima Museum of Art, Japan), with a similar subject: a mixed group of men, women and children riding horses in a rural landscape with a vast, open sky and rolling hills. Given the formal similarities between these two paintings, it is reasonable to draw a connection between their settings. However, for Degas, the complex dynamics between humans and animals were far more interesting than the precise identification of the landscape.
Like many of Degas's early modern masterpieces, Enfants et poneys dans un parc, painted circa 1867, combines solid draftsmanship and a bold handling of paint with the radical compositional devices, including obfuscation and abrupt foreshortening, that would come to define the artist's unique form of Impressionist art. It is, in the words of the former director of the Musee d'Orsay, and curator of the landmark 1988-1989 retrospective of the artist, Henri Loyrette, “a deliberately ambiguous canvas, loaded with meaning” (quoted in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 146). An early horse scene, this work reflects Degas's defining subjects--along with ballet dancers and bathers--and his signature wit and sharp eye for human behavior.
[Degas’s] horse-and-rider pictures of the 1860s remained one of his most original achievements and the surest sign of his shifting ambition.
Richard Kendall
The young subjects of Degas’s painting are all dressed in the same gray jackets and skirts with black ribboned hats, but they display varying levels of horseback riding skill. The oldest girl, in the upper left corner, sits confidently astride her chestnut-brown pony, who leaps over a row of flowers with ease. The middle child and her pony have become stuck in that same flowerbed; they face in the opposite direction, faces obscured. Meanwhile, the youngest, standing in the lower right, struggles to command her steed: a reluctant black donkey who lies down on the grass, making direct eye-contact with the viewer. The little girl digs her heels into the dirt and tugs at the donkey's reins, but to no avail. Her frustration—and the animal's reciprocal stubbornness—was clearly a source of amusement to the artist. The unruly white goat or lamb running in the background further enhances the levity of the scene.
The young female horseback riders in Enfants et poneys dans un parc prefigure another important subject in Degas’s oeuvre: ballerinas at the Parisian Opéra. Indeed, Degas’s first painting of the ballet, Portrait de Mlle Fiocre à propos du ballet “La Source” (Lemoisne, no. 146; Brooklyn Museum of Art), is also dated to the late 1860s. Just as the three young equestriennes wear matching riding habits, Degas's young ballerinas often wear matching tutus. In the same way, Degas’s riders display a range of different movements, from an elegant gallop to being stuck in the mud; similarly, some of Degas’s ballerinas twirl and arabesque, while others assume clumsy, more realistic poses out of exhaustion or boredom. Importantly, Degas’s equestriennes are set outdoors, while his ballerinas dance against artificial landscapes, painted on two-dimensional stage sets.
The landscape represented in Enfants et poneys dans un parc may be a Parisian public park like the Bois de Boulogne, a popular site of bourgeois recreation in the Second Empire. This theory is supported by the fact that, in the 1860s, Degas began painting professional jockeys and horses at the Longchamp race track there. Several other modern French artists also painted amateur equestriennes in the Bois de Boulogne. Those amazones, as they were known in the late nineteenth century, are clad in fashionable riding habits and top hats. Degas’s contemporaries also pictured these figures, for example, Edouard Manet's L’Amazone (Portrait of Marie Lefébure), 1870-1875 (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1873 work, La promenade au bois de Boulogne (Hamburger Kunsthalle). The American painter Mary Cassatt, who was known to ride horses in the Bois de Boulogne, shared Degas’s interest in playful depictions of children in the park. She painted her older sister, Lydia Cassatt, driving Degas’s little niece in a horse-drawn carriage in the 1881, Woman and Child Driving (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
The Degas scholar Jean Sutherland Boggs, author of the 1998 Degas at the Races exhibition catalogue, posited that the setting of Enfants et poneys dans un parc is not a public park, but rather a private country estate—similar to Ménil-Hubert, the home of Degas’s childhood friend, Paul Valpinçon. Boggs has also suggested that the younger girl may have been modeled after Valpinçon’s only daughter, Hortense, who was about six years old at the time this work was executed. In the late 1860s, Degas produced a smaller painting, La promenade à cheval (Lemoisne, no. 117; Hiroshima Museum of Art, Japan), with a similar subject: a mixed group of men, women and children riding horses in a rural landscape with a vast, open sky and rolling hills. Given the formal similarities between these two paintings, it is reasonable to draw a connection between their settings. However, for Degas, the complex dynamics between humans and animals were far more interesting than the precise identification of the landscape.