Édouard Manet: The Races at Longchamp, 1866 – Porcelain Art Mug

Manet turned the racecourse around. Racing pictures before him showed horses in profile, strung across the canvas like a frieze. Manet put the viewer on the track: the field comes head-on out of a haze of dust, and there is no room left to admire the horses one by one.

The crowd is a smear of black hats and pale parasols behind the rail; the green of the course runs away into the Bois de Boulogne. Nothing is finished in the academic sense. At speed, nothing is.

Longchamp had opened in 1857 and was the fashionable course of the Second Empire — a place to be seen as much as to watch.

Édouard Manet, The Races at Longchamp, 1866. Oil on canvas, 44 × 84.2 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection, 1922.424. Public domain; the museum's reproduction is released under CC0. The mug carries the central section of the panorama.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.