Claude Fossoux, Polo Players, Signed Oil on Canvas, French School, 1970s, Framed

Two riders come across the field at the gallop, mallets swung high, one in blue and one in dark green over white breeches. Their chestnut ponies are caught mid-stride, and the ground beneath them is a field of yellow and white touches that throws the light back up.

Oil on canvas, 18 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm), 24 x 21 inches (61 x 53 cm) framed, signed lower left Claude Fossoux, French School, 1970s, in a gilt and black frame with a linen slip and an engraved name plate.

Nothing in this canvas is blended. The ground is built from short separate touches of yellow, white and pale green laid side by side, the background is a wall of blue, rose and green marks with no drawn form in it at all, and the ponies are turned in brown, honey and pink over the same broken surface. Only two reds are saturated, one on a foreleg and one on a rider's shoulder, and they carry across the whole picture. It is a divided way of painting, the Impressionist manner carried into the later twentieth century and used here for speed and light.

Polo returned to France in the years this was painted, played on grass at Bagatelle and Deauville, and it drew painters for the same reason racing had drawn them a century before. A horse at full stretch cannot be studied, only remembered, and a broken touch is the only way to put one down. The subject and the handling belong together here.

The frame is a black lacquered band with a gilt outer moulding and a linen slip, and it carries a brass plate engraved with the painter's name.

The canvas is on its keyed stretcher and the paint surface is sound. A framer's label from Delf Cadres d'Art is on the reverse.