Of utmost concern was the missing upper left corner, which quite literally ruined the work’s visual appeal. Stains, possibly oil-based, were scattered around the surface. The thin wove tan paper had darkened with a noticeable mat burn (a dark brown line around the perimeter of the drawing due to contact with a former acidic mat). When we examined it in 2015, we found it had been adhered to a mat with paper remnants along the verso edges. The time away from the museums had taken its toll on Degas’s sketch. Degas loved it almost as much as the ballet, and he dedicated many paintings and drawings to the sport. A luxury sport imported from England, horse racing was in vogue in 19th-century Paris. The motif depicted here is connected to one of the artist’s favorite subjects of modern life: the horse race. Degas used the brown color of the paper as a middle tone, describing the figure with rapid, energetic black lines, and then adding highlights in white to bolster the contrasts and heighten the effect of this figural study. Essence is a technique in which paint is drained of oil and mixed with turpentine to give it a matte gouache-like consistency. This spirited sketch from the late 1860s was drawn in essence with a brush. In the years it was lost, the drawing had suffered. In 2015, the work reappeared as part of an estate and was promptly delivered to the Harvard Art Museums. But before Sachs could give it to Harvard, the drawing was stolen while on exhibition elsewhere in the United States. It had been promised to the museum by collector and Fogg associate director Paul Sachs. Degas’s drawing Mounted Jockey appeared in a 1940 catalogue Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art-though it wasn’t yet part of the collections.
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