A “SERIES OF OPERATIONS”: EDGAR DEGAS, THE STEEPLECHASE, AND THE THEMATICS OF LOSS

This dissertation is the first sustained analysis of Edgar Degas’s two monumental paintings of the steeplechase theme: The Steeplechase, which the artist began around 1866 and continued to revise over the course of four decades, and The Fallen Jockey which he painted around 1896-8. With regard to The Steeplechase my dissertation argues against the conventional art historical view that the painting unproblematically represents Degas’s first major effort to picture modern life. Until now, scholars have viewed the painting within the framework of the art of his impressionist contemporaries, namely those painters who focused on the open air, the vie moderne of Parisian life, the pleasures of the landscape and its many entertainments. Instead, my dissertation redirects attention to the powerful influence of the generation of French painters that preceded Degas, specifically those who themselves took up the theme of horse painting. Through a close textual analysis of Salon criticism, I argue that for Degas, as for his predecessors, the equestrian subject served as a useful pictorial construct by which to grapple with questions to do with the transformation and, ultimately, the loss of history painting—or la grande peinture—during the first half of the nineteenth century. Probing the nature of Degas’s modifications of The Steeplechase, including its final iteration in the form of The Fallen Jockey, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate the depth of Degas’s commitment to ambitious painting—even at the cost of self-exposure of the most intimate kind. Additionally, in tracing the shifting pictorial norms over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century within the context of Degas’s evolving treatment of the steeplechase theme this dissertation will offer an alternative account of the aging artist: rather than a solitary recluse we discover an artist deeply responsive to contemporary currents in art. This appreciation serves as the foundation for my account of Degas’s masterful, yet understudied Fallen Jockey: as essentially a final statement on the fate of ambitious painting in the fin-de-siècle