Degas had almost Leonardo's technical skill as a draughtsman, and his drawings of
horses are sometimes so like Leonardo's that one might, in memory, confuse them.
Two things in the world gave him pure aesthetic pleasure, the ballet and the racecourse,
and, although he could sometimes be cruel to dancers, he always looked with
admiration at les purs sang. He never painted a horse in isolation, or insisted on its
plastic qualities, as Stubbs and Gericault had done. In the age of the camera, his horses
are part of the general scene, at the beginning or the end of a race, often confused with
other horses but observed with an unequalled sense of their grace and energy.
