The 10 best… sporting artworks

1 | The Races at Longchamps Edouard Manet, 1867 Art Institute of Chicago The Longchamps racecourse, immortalised by both Manet and Degas, is on the banks of the Seine near the Bois de Boulogne. It opened in 1857 and is still one of the world's leading thoroughbred racetracks today. Manet, a keen visitor, shows the thundering horses as a single vignette, almost neck and neck, raising clouds of dust and separated from the spectators only by a fragile fence. The race is so fast that the heads of the crowd, turning to follow, are merging into a blur. 2 | The Football Players Henri Rousseau, 1908 Guggenheim museum, New York The beautiful game, in Rousseau's picture, becomes both sublime and ridiculous. That is his trademark gift. He has no idea how to paint hands and feet, how to show a bent knee or the stripes of a football jersey creasing around an elbow but he makes the scene look exhilaratingly joyous. As for the pitch, this clearing in a strikingly exotic wood, these players would hardly be able to dribble, let alone score a goal in such a narrow passage. In fact the game is quite clearly rugby, yet this gauche painting of two pairs of pyjama-clad twins is still known and cherished as Rousseau's Footballers. 3 | Pulcinella and the Tumblers Tiepolo, 1797 Museo del Settecento veneziano, Venice These travelling gymnasts are putting on a show in 18th-century Venice, which is also where Tiepolo painted the scene as a fresco. Pulcinella is the hook-nosed trickster in the black mask, a commedia del'arte figure somewhere between Harlequin and Punch, responsible for turning the world upside down. And this is what these gymnasts are enacting with all their springy athleticism. For what Tiepolo depicts is an aspect of the gymnast's agility: the ability to walk on one's hands while appearing to tumble all over the place, to topple while keeping one's balance. 4 | The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake Thomas Eakins, 1873 Cleveland Art Museum This luminous painting commemorates the first pair-oared sculling race in America, held on the Schuykill river in Philadelphia in 1872. It shows the Biglin brothers turning the stake, John pushing his oar while Barney pulls his to complete the gliding movement repeated in Eakins's beautiful composition. The Biglins are winning – their opponents are still rowing towards their flag in the distance – and the picture celebrates their team spirit and closeness. Eakins, the great realist, painted from personal experience: he too was a dedicated oarsman on the very same river. 5 | A Rally Sir John Lavery, 1885 Glasgow Museums Resource Centre Lawn tennis was still quite new when this young woman hit the ball back across the net. Anecdote has it that Major Walter Clopton Wingfield began playing outdoors with vulcanised rubber balls in London in 1874 and the Irish-born painter Sir John Lavery got the bug on his return from studying impressionism in Paris only a few years later. His painting throws the emphasis on the girl in her hopelessly impractical but fetching dress, dramatising her energy and concentration and not just her femininity (we don't even see her face). Lavery painted several tennis scenes in Scotland, each regarded as somewhat pioneering, rather like the player herself. 6 | Dynamism of a Cyclist Umberto Boccioni, 1913 Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Racing along, head down, knees pumping, wheels spinning, covering immense distances at breathtaking speed: how can an artist ever depict a champion cyclist in action? Any two-dimensional image is likely to limit the sense of ongoing motion, and this was not good enough for the Italian futurists. Umberto Boccioni, arguably the best of them, follows the pioneering French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey, whose split-second shots of soldiers sprinting were all recorded on the same picture, in showing past, present and future all at once. Boccioni's cyclist is an overlapping sequence of stop-start instants. He did the same thing, perhaps more legibly, with a little dog hurrying along on a leash. 7 | The Discobolus Unknown British Museum, London The stunning Discobolus, a classical athlete compressing all his rippling power into one fling of the discus, is among the most famous images from the ancient world. This marble statue is a Roman copy of the lost bronze original, attributed to the sculptor Myron c470-440 BC. The moment shown is so fleeting it could scarcely be observed as a still form, yet the sculptor transforms it into a monument of (and to) balance, athleticism and judgment. Discus-throwing was the first element of the pentathlon, regarded as a feat of grace as well as athleticism. This copy has the head wrongly looking away from the discus. 8 | The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch Henry Raeburn, c1795 Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh The Reverend Robert Walker is the ideal Olympic candidate: a brilliant amateur and founder member of the Edinburgh Skating Club. Raeburn's most famous painting shows Walker sweeping on one leg across Duddingston loch – absolutely still, and yet in full motion. It is the portrait as action shot. The figure cuts a dark diagonal through the chill grey light, his blades etching criss-cross lines on the ice, perfectly mimicked in paint. Walker was also a member of (and chaplain to) the Royal Company of Archers. 9 | Alice Swimming in a Pool of Tears John Tenniel, 1865 from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Alice is not so much swimming, it is true, as treading water at this point in Adventures in Wonderland . She has slipped into the pool of tears she had shed when nine feet high, but has now shrunk to the size of the mouse that will soon swim by. Tenniel's Alice with her unruly mane is as familiar as the books themselves, a proverbial figure here adrift in Tenniel's graphic lines. There are plenty of other swimmers in art, but none so immediately recognisable. 10 | Stag at Sharkey's George Bellows, 1909 Cleveland Museum of Art Sharkey's was a private club in New York run by the eponymous crook, Tom Sharkey, and stag is exactly what George Bellows's sensational painting shows: two prize-fighters locking horns. The gloves are barely visible in the ruck of ligament, bone and muscle as the boxers clash, elbow in mouth and fist undercutting jaw. Bellows chose painting over professional baseball and was a regular at Sharkey's, directly across the street from his studio. The vantage point is low, so that the viewer is nearly level with the Goyaesque crowd of gaping heads. Public boxing was considered morally degrading at the time, hence the underground fight club.