Public collection via the Cleveland Museum of Art
AT-00011371About the Artwork
Degas’s drawing Gentleman Rider alludes to the steeplechase, a fashionable race in which the riders were not professional jockeys but, instead, “gentlemen.” Here, Degas demonstrated his unceasing interest in the horse’s anatomy in motion, playfully revising the position of the animal’s hind legs, as he would a dancer’s. The top-hatted rider remains a ghostly shadow—it is clearly the horse rather than its rider who captured the artist’s imagination.
Inscriptions
inscribed in red ink, lower left: "Degas (estate stamp)"
Provenance
Estate of Muriel Butkin.
Exhibition history
French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 26-October 28, 2001). Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (February 15-May 16, 2004). L'Impressionnisme vu d'Amérique. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France (organizer) (June 9-September 9, 2007); Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France (October 6, 2007-January 20, 2008).
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
- Date
- c. 1890
- Medium
- black chalk
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 29.5 x 24.3 cm (11 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- Bequest of Muriel Butkin
- Accession no.
- 2009.123
More by Edgar Degas in museum collections
Open-access museum record · AT-00011371
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