Degas will exhibit annually in the Salon…

Degas will exhibit annually in the Salon during the next five years, but he will submit no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signals his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter.

The change in his art is influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).