Young Spartans Exercising

Nude Spartan girls taunt and challenge a group of boys to wrestle, the two lean groups facing off across an open field with elders and the city beyond. Degas painted this ambitious classical scene early in his career, but he gave the antique subject a strange, modern awkwardness - the bodies angular, the gestures real rather than ideal. Now in London's National Gallery, Young Spartans Exercising shows the future Impressionist still wrestling with history painting, yet already pulling it toward the observed, unidealized human truth that would define his mature work.