After decades of rural landscapes lining the walls of the Paris salons, French painters in the 1860s turned to modern urban life. Edouard Manet led the parade of Parisians at play with "Luncheon on the Grass" and quickly had a rival in Edgar Degas, with his always popular ballet scenes.

Their interest converged here at fashionable Longchamp racecourse, which opened in 1857, during Napoleon III's Second Empire, an integral element in Baron Haussmann's replanned city. At the Bois de Boulogne home of "le Jockey Club", Degas initially tried and failed to reproduce the imagery he'd seen in British racing prints and Gericault's paintings of English horse races, and Manet at first struggled too.

Manet abandoned his large "Aspects of a Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne" after attempting to correct the composition by sawing off parts of it. He did better with his second effort, "The Races at Longchamps" from 1866, below left.

"For the first time in the history of art," Richard Brettell writes in "French Salon Artists: 1800-1900", "the viewer is startled into believing that he is standing not safely along the sidelines, but directly in the centre of the track with six horses charging full speed toward him!"

Whereas Manet's impulse was to grasp the essence of the whole visual field and to interpret the race as intensely directed motion, Degas' was to create a grammar of form with which to construct a painting," Brettell says. "With their precise, almost enameled surfaces and lack of single focus, they are as radical in their lack of psychological cohesiveness as Manet's painting is in its unity of motion." "Race Horses" is below centre.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec came to the races later, no doubt seeking a bit of fresh air after all those smoky nights at the Moulin Rouge. That's his "At the Race Course" below right.