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THE HORSE RACE "Cursing and whipping like a madman, the scarlet jockey drew up on the turn, hung knee to knee, passed him by" The Horse Race, a painting Wyeth executed for James Boyd's novel, Drums, captures the motion and excitement of a racing scene that takes place in the book. Considered the best novel about the Revolutionary War era, Drums was published by Scribner's first in 1925, with a subsequent edition illustrated by Wyeth published in 1928. This particular scene captures a three-heat match race between a horse from Virginia, ridden by a jockey in red silks, and the local favorite horse from North Carolina, ridden in the second and third heats by Johnny, the novel's protagonist (in yellow). Drums was part of the Scribner's Illustrated Classic series that Wyeth was commissioned to illustrate. The series, consisting of 25 books, is perhaps the work for which Wyeth is best known, though he began to resent the commercialism of illustrations only three years after he began the series. When illustrating a book Wyeth would read the text several times before selecting a passage. He often made annotations in the margins indicating the particular passage he thought would be best to illustrate. In a 1912 editorial in the New York Times, Wyeth stressed the importance of not choosing the obvious passages to illustrate: "It sounds paradoxical, perhaps, to say that by so restraining one's self in the choice of subject one gains more freedom by it: but it is undeniably so. By avoiding the shackles of explicit action and detail described and insisted upon by the text, the illustrator attains a field of far greater range upon which to exercise his powers, emotional and technical, and is given a better chance to produce something of real merit. And, after all, if the talent of writing and painting are to be coupled into a harmonious whole, is it not just as important that the illustrator's horizon be broadened as it is that the writer alone should be given perfect freedom?" After the death of his mother in 1925, N. C. Wyeth began to experiment slightly with modernism. While this was mostly in his personal work, it did find its way into several of his illustrations, albeit in a more restrained manner. Dr. Joyce Stoner notes in Wyeth's catalogue raisonne that "Wyeth's paintings from 1925 to 1935 suddenly featured skewed perspectives ... and Russian rayonism with futuristic planes, lines, and colors." (p. 84). While Wyeth tended to subdue his modernist experiments in his illustrations, The Horse Race is a notable exception. Wyeth's friend Christian Brinton, a resident of nearby West Chester, Pennsylvania, was a noted art critic of the early 20th century who promoted the 20th century art of countries often pushed to the periphery such as Russia, Sweden, and Spain. The two, who helped found the Chester County Fine Arts Society, were close friends and it is likely that Wyeth was introduced to modernism through Brinton. In examining the upper half of The Horse Race, triangular planes of various shades of blue, green, and pink are readily visible. These strong diagonals not only create a sense of movement and excitement fitting to a horse racing scene, but also demonstrate Wyeth's experimentations with modernism, in particular, Russian rayonism, one of the earliest avant-garde movements in Russia, and one favored by Wyeth's good friend Brinton. While Wyeth never openly admitted to a direct rayonist influence, he did refer to a series of paintings as his "prism paintings." What distinctly separates these paintings from an unmitigated rayonist style is Wyeth's refusal to integrate his subjects into these planes of color, preferring to relegate them to the background. His experiments with modernism, moreover, stem more from an attempt to capture the effects of light (in keeping with the lessons of his teacher, Howard Pyle) than from the intellectual theories that dominated the art of the early 20th century. There is a striking contrast between the modernist planes in the upper register of the canvas and the 18th-century garb of the crowd of people in the background. The clothing of the two jockeys, however, is relatively timeless. This is somewhat surprising, as Wyeth was known for creating historically accurate scenes, especially in regard to period clothing. Perhaps the timeless dress of the jockeys is an effort to temper the contrast between the modernist prisms and the mass of people in tri-corner hats on the other side of the railing. The railing in the lower half of the register visually separates the viewer from the scene. It serves as a barricade, keeping us out of the action. As the eye moves upward, however, we recognize people on the other side of the track. While we may not be dressed in Revolutionary War-era garb, we, like them, become spectators in the excitement of viewing the horse race. Moreover, the rails create horizontal registers in the painting, a visual technique used by many artists to facilitate visual digestion of the composition.