Cheval arrêté

Cast from one of the fifteen equine sculptures that Degas modeled in wax between 1865 and 1881, Cheval arrêté reflects the artist's enduring fascination with the anatomy and movement of the horse. Degas produced numerous drawings and wax studies as he developed his paintings of racing scenes, repeatedly returning to the motif in his exploration of posture and motion. Working pliable wax over improvised armatures, he investigated the animal's form in three dimensions, pursuing the same restless experimentation that characterized his celebrated studies of dancers. As Anne Dumas has observed: "Degas was obsessed, above all, with the figure, with movement and pose. Drawing for him was a way of discovering and capturing motion and posture. His sculpture can perhaps be seen as an extension to drawing, a means by which Degas could work through his ideas in a direct, tactile and three-dimensional form, and a fresh arena in which to work out problems. Like his printmaking, sculpture was a particularly experimental form" (op. cit., p. 40). So absorbed was Degas by his equine subjects that in 1888 he gave them priority over his series of pastel bathers, declaring, "I haven't yet done enough horses. The women must wait in their tubs" (quoted in ibid., p. 15).
In Cheval arrêté, Degas captures the latent energy of a thoroughbred at rest. Rendered in profile, the horse stands alert, its elongated neck extending forward, ears pricked and tail raised, conveying a sense of vitality even in stillness. The lean proportions of its body and the subtle articulation of its musculature reveal Degas' acute understanding of equine anatomy, while the irregular, richly textured surface bears the unmistakable traces of his direct manipulation of the wax. Degas had ample opportunity to study horses firsthand. He frequented Parisian racing circles and visited the racetrack at Argentan, near Ménil-Hubert, the Normandy estate of his friend Paul Valpinçon. During his first visit to Valpinçon in the autumn of 1861, he also made sketches at the national stud farm, Haras du Pin. Over the following two decades, Degas regularly attended the races, producing extensive notes and sketches that would inform his paintings of horses, jockeys and fashionable spectators at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne.
Cheval arrêté also reveals Degas' familiarity with the equestrian wax sculptures of Joseph Cuvelier, a sculptor whom he befriended in the 1860s, when both artists were exploring the theme of the fallen jockey. Theodore Reff has suggested that the present sculpture may have been conceived as a tribute to Cuvelier, who died in October 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. As Reff explains: "There is some evidence that Degas attempted to organize a memorial exhibition of Cuvelier's work after the war. It was at just about this time that Degas modeled Cheval arrêté, which resembles the finely worked equestrian sculptures, also typically seen in profile view, in which Cuvelier specialized. The practice of sculpture as Degas understood it required the wax ultimately to be cast in bronze, even if he did not take the step himself. And bronze evokes by its very nature, regardless of subject-matter, the idea of a monument" (T. Reff, "The Morbid Content of Degas' Sculpture," Apollo, vol. 142, no. 402, August 1995, p. 64). In Cheval arrêté, the immediacy of Degas' tactile experimentation thus finds an enduring expression in bronze, transforming an intimate study of a familiar subject into a remarkably vivid sculptural presence.