Aux Courses en Province is an oil on canvas work, painted by Edgar Degas in 1872. Degas depicts a group of upper-class tourists attending the races in the French countryside. In the lower-right foreground resides a stationary horse carriage. The carriage’s passengers, comprised of a coachman, a small dog and two women - one cradling a baby while the other holds an parasol - appear to be wholly uninterested in the scene behind them, instead …showed first 75 words of 1111 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1111 total…those, brown and green rolling hills rise up to meet the horizon line. Thus, what initially looks like a rather simple and idyllic scene of a pleasant day at the races in the country is in fact another of Degas’ clever visual manipulations. He refuses the renaissance notion of a 2-D plane as a window into depth, and instead plays with the compression of space through the use of cropping, neutral lighting, and color patches.