The horse has been a game animal, a beast of burden, a means of traction, then a war horse, a working tool before becoming a subject of leisure through horse riding. Present since the beginning of time in the life of men, it is not surprising to find it represented in all forms of art. From simple landscapes to battlefields, portraits or genre scenes, artists of all periods and styles have, each in their own way, rendered the beauty and elegance of the horse, a symbol of power and freedom. Equestrian painting through the centuries provides us with an immense testimony of past civilizations, customs, and traditions, but also a wealth of information about the horse itself.
The first paintings of horses
Adapting their drawings to the relief of the wall, prehistoric men have left us a considerable number of horses whose gaits and morphological details are of an astonishing precision. The thinness of the limbs, which suggests speed in the race, is contrasted with a stocky body, a thick and short neck with a bristly mane; the coat varies from orange yellow to mouse-gray: these are the main characteristics of the primitive horse.
Mixed with the ashes of the fireplace, the manganous earth gave the black, the iron oxide the red and the lime the white. The colors were then mixed with animal fat and applied by hand or blown through a hollow bone.
If the most beautiful horses in cave art are in the caves of Altamira and Castillo in Spain, it is in those of Lascaux that they are represented in the greatest number: they are counted by hundreds, of all sizes, isolated or in herds.
The domestication of the horse will offer to the cave paintings, next to the hunting scenes, figurations of horses mounted and harnessed.
To describe all the horses that galloped on the bas-reliefs, friezes, basins and funerary urns or immense frescoes of Antiquity is a Titan’s work! However, we can see in these representations an evolution due to the use of the horse mounted or harnessed. Concerning the gallop, the Assyrians and Egyptians represented their horses in only two attitudes: the bent gallop and the extended gallop. Greek art added the canter which, more collected, differs from the rearing pattern only by the lifting of a hind leg. For the anecdote, we will quote Apelles, a great Greek painter who represented “a canter so admirable that the horses passing near it whinnied.” During a visit to Ephesus, the city where the artist lived, Alexander saw one of his portraits executed by Apelles but, finding it not very resembling, he gave it only a faint praise. At the same moment, one of the horses of his suite neighed with vigor. Upset by the king’s remark, the painter could not help but speak: “Lord, this horse knows more about painting than you!”
The Middle Ages will see the appearance of a new form of cavalry and the beginnings of horse-drawn vehicles as a means of transportation. Riding a chanson de geste horse will be the exclusive privilege of the nobility, praised as much in the novels of chivalry and as in the multitude of illuminations that will adorn the manuscripts. It was not until later that the pictorial representation of the horse took on a real dimension.
The Renaissance, a great turning point for the horse in painting
With the same meticulousness as the miniaturists who preceded them, painters began to study the anatomy of their subjects and to take an interest in space. The equestrian representations will come to life and will be tinged with a hint of realism while exploiting the thousand riches offered by the brand new technique of oil painting. Experts in the art, we can cite – among others – the Van Eyck brothers for Flemish painting, Gozzoli, Piero della Francesca and Uccello in Italy. Scenes of battles and portraits follow one another to the dynamic rhythm of the horses, in a setting still abounding in sophisticated details. Note that horses are no longer systematically represented from the front, profile or back. The painters began to seek depth through postures and movements that allowed them to fill the space. Little by little, the concern for historical reality and detail seems to fade away in favor of this search for space. The Gothic influence will gradually disappear.
Although he is better known as a medalist, Pisanello can be considered the precursor of this new genre. Apart from drawings, watercolors and a few fragments of frescoes, there is nothing left to testify to his immense talent. As an equestrian, he studied horses and the equestrian world in detail. His frescoes and portraits of the great men of the Italian courts show an admirable gift for observation and a sense of reality, at a time when the Renaissance style was just emerging.
There is no doubt that Pisanello’s work influenced Leonardo da Vinci.
As in the water or the sky, Vinci tamed the movement, dynamics, and energy of horses. His observations go to the dissection of the slightest muscle, to the meticulous study of gestures, to the extreme morphological precision. He wants to add “soul” to the movement. With a mathematician’s mind, he juggled with proportions and beauty. Vinci placed his first horses in the Adoration of the Magi, an unfinished canvas since the Florentine genius left for Milan, hired as a musician by the Sforza family. He will present himself there with a lute of his own invention, the shape of which was none other than that of a horse’s skull…
Was this the result of the vagaries of life or the artist’s casual state of mind? Vinci never saw any of his equestrian projects come to fruition: whether it was the monumental equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza on which he worked for ten years or the Florentine fresco he shared the commission with Michelangelo – The Battle of Anghiari – of which all we have left (apart from the copy made by Rubens) are his sketches to imagine the energy and ardor of his horses in battle. But we will forgive him this emptiness as he left so many teachings to art, science, and human reflection.
We are also in the era of great equestrian portraits. The dignity, the presence that the horse confers to the one who rides it does not escape the sovereigns and the nobles, concerned about their image and the power that they represent.
The equestrian portraits of François I by Jean Clouet are a fine example of the genre, even if the proportions of the horse are less successful than the king’s costume and the details of the harness. In the painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the king rides a black horse and on his caparison are the monograms H for the king, D for Diane de Poitiers, and C for Queen Marie-Christine. The painting in the Louvre represents him in the same posture, on an Isabelle horse, with a more sober harness.
Under the influence of Rubens, the equestrian portrait will be marked by the transition to Baroque art: the round and elegant silhouettes of Iberian horses will emerge. Long, silky, and wavy manes, floating tails, impetuous gaits and, on the canvas, a diagonal arrangement of the subjects.
Whether at the Spanish court, where Velázquez immortalized the royal family, Titian, and his solemn portrait of Charles V at the battle of Mühlberg or Van Dyck, whose portrait of Charles I is a model of refinement, the days of fixed positions and flat structures were over. But, despite the innovations brought by Vinci in terms of perspective and, later, the research of Baroque painters, the equestrian portrait will remain for a long time very conventional and without great innovation.
Horse and painting: landscapes and scenes of everyday life
Without abandoning the courts of the lords, the battlefields and the themes of mythology, the painters will also focus on scenes of everyday life: work in the fields, travelers on horseback, carriages on the road, horses running free, riders at the riding school or equestrian entertainment outside… The Flemish experts will be the precursors of this new genre whose vogue will extend until the 18th century. Their compositions with precise lines, bathed in a great luminosity but all of softness and poetry, will also consider space, volumes and
the construction of the whole. Paulus Potter, considered as the leader of the genre, was attached to this realism, full of refinement, elegance, and delicacy.
The piebald horse, painted in 1653, whose immobility contrasts singularly with the vivacity of its gaze is a perfect model of the genre. Potter’s work will influence many artists, such as Van de Velde, Van Lear or Wouwerman, and will lay the foundations of animal painting in the following centuries.
In the eighteenth century, George Stubbs undoubtedly won the prize for animal painting to which nothing predestined him other than his immense passion for horses. It is thus as a perfect autodidact and without the slightest artistic training that he became interested, first, in the anatomy of the horse.
For years he isolated himself in a secluded farm in Lincolnshire and meticulously dissected numerous horse corpses, studying the slightest particularities of their morphology. He recorded the results of his observations in his Anatomy of the Horse, a work that is now very rare. He also started an album of comparative anatomy and published a book on the origin of the main racehorses. Mennessier de La Lance rightly cites him as “an English anatomist and painter”.
Besides his scientific friends who praised the accuracy and the quality of his drawings, the amateurs of painting discovered a talented artist who knew how to combine with an immense talent the rigor of the scientific observation and the aesthetic and artistic sensitivity. “Nature is and will always be superior to art”, he used to say, but this did not prevent him from embellishing reality with that poetry full of warmth, gentleness, and emotion that he mastered so well.
Stubbs’ horses are always in the foreground, against a plain background or a serene landscape; they could stand on their own! This was the case for a famous chestnut: Whistlejacket that Stubbs painted in 1762 and which is said to be an “unfinished” commission for an equestrian portrait of George III. Lord Rockingham is said to have commissioned three painters for this portrait: a portrait painter for the king, a landscape painter for the setting and Stubbs for the horse. When Stubbs returned his work, Rockingham was so impressed by the quality of the work that he decided to keep the painting as we know it: this impetuous chestnut with such perfect lines.
The emerging craze for horse racing and the growing fame of English thoroughbreds offered Stubbs a subject that he exploited extensively. He became one of the most renowned painters of the sporting life, but he did not neglect his peaceful scenes of naked horses or horses in pasture, in which he excelled, nor the commissions for portraits of breeders, owners and the cracks of the turf that he honored so well.
Horses and painting: the Napoleonic epic
Since the horde of artists, led by Charles Le Brun, surrounded by Louis XIV, no monarch has really succeeded in imposing an artistic style that enhances both his person and the kingdom.
It was not until Napoleon and his pronounced taste for propaganda that the “empire style” emerged, all to his glory. Of all the artists whose services Napoleon praised, the most famous was without a doubt Jacques-Louis David, an admirable portraitist, influenced by Rubens, whose art of composition and richness of color he captured in his Portrait of Count Potocki (1781).
It is interesting to compare this equestrian portrait with the one David painted twenty years later, Bonaparte crossing the Saint-Bernard Pass. Wishing to be portrayed on horseback, it is surprising that the general, who was very attached to his image and who followed with great attention the realization of all the works, accepted the aberration of his position in the saddle and the position of the reins of his mount, which was, to say the least, whimsical. Why did David depart so far from the rules of equestrian art that he had otherwise mastered so well, notably for, Count Potocki J But this is only a detail, for the work is no less expert in its impetus, its hues, and its symbols.
In the wake of David, other artists will serve the historical painting and glorify the Empire. Among them is one of his students: Jacques-Antoine Gros, the one who will give horses a new vigor, strength and nobility, the beginning of the emerging romantic trend. Let’s also mention Meissonnier, Détaillé and especially Carie Vernet, this remarkable rider who divided his work between military painting and hunting and racing scenes. His horses are racy, elegant, and fine like the thoroughbreds he is particularly fond of. His son Horace followed him in this art and became the national painter of the Napoleonic wars. Théophile Gautier said of him: “If he wants to reproduce a rider, he does not camp him naked on one of these marble steeds of Phidias, but he puts between his legs a solid horse of our regiments, harnessed according to the ordinance.” The irony of fate would have it that this great artist, also a skilled horseman, succumbed to the consequences of a fall from a donkey!
Horses and painting: romanticism and exoticism honor horses
The theatrical effects freezing the horses with rigor and without soul will give way to representations animated by passion and ardor, sometimes tinged with a dramatic violence.
The first to take horses out of this academic rigor in which art had frozen them for so long was Géricault. Rider and fine rider, he knew how to make them vibrate like no other before him. The muscles twitch under the skin, the eye is keen, the gesture energetic and elegant. Géricault was interested in all breeds and in horses in all their uses. Whether Oriental or Percheron, the mounts of valiant soldiers or modest mine horses, they are all expressive and in perpetual motion, vectors of the artist’s emotions and great sensitivity.
Like many others, Géricault traveled to England and was seduced by the work of landscape artists and animal painters from across the Channel. He wrote to his friend Horace Vernet: “The masters have not produced anything better in this genre. One should not be ashamed to go back to school. This shows how much he was marked by the English style.
The Epsom Derby (1821) is certainly the most successful of the performances that followed this trip. The horses are breathtaking in this flying gallop so unreal, but which infuses the whole with a wonderful movement.
The romantic and passionate soul of Delacroix has nothing to envy to that of his friend Géricault whom he met shortly after returning to the Beaux-Arts. His horses will make the color sing and furiously unleash the movement. They are powerful, they explode with vitality. Their anatomy, often imprecise, sometimes inaccurate, proves, if necessary, that ignoring the requirements of resemblance, it is a great lyricism that dictated the brush strokes of Delacroix and the fusion of his colors.
His palette became even more illuminated after his trip to Morocco in 1832. From then on, each time he abandoned historical, hunting, or mythological scenes, it was to immerse himself in his oriental memories. As Baudelaire wrote: “The oriental idea took in him strongly and despotically the upper hand”. All will be then only power and bubbling of the horses – even immobile -, brightness of the costumes, burnous and manes in the wind, bathed in a nuanced light, sometimes shimmering sometimes dark.
Delacroix always liked to represent horses in pairs: side by side like the Horses emerging from the sea (1860), facing each other or violently entangled as in this fight of stallions which he attended one day in Tangier and for which he affirmed to have seen there, “all that Gros and Rubens could not imagine of more fantastic and of lighter”. The poignant scene of Arabian Horses Fighting in a Stable, executed three years before the artist’s death, is in some ways a reflection of him: a constant duel between revolt and poetry, beauty and passion, color, and movement.
Horses and painting: the gallop of horses on canvas
Since ancient times, artists have used three different attitudes to represent horses at full gallop. The rearing patterns meant to evoke the notion of speed were far from reality because the hindquarters, firmly fixed to the ground, held back the momentum given by the forelegs, even if they were extended forward, as in the extended gallop, which was the most frequent pattern.
The influence of the English horses popularized by racing began to interest artists. Departing from the sculptural and rustic style of the ancients, they tried to make the elongated gallop more mobile, more expressive. Exaggerating the divergence of the limbs, they also placed the hind hooves on the claws, vertically, and no longer flat.
We will speak of flying gallop when the hind hooves, completely turned towards the sky, no longer touch the ground. However, the flying gallop did not replace the prancing type until the 1820s. This new motif, inaugurated by English “sporting art”, also penetrated academic painting through C. Vernet, who nevertheless continued to paint horses in an elongated gallop, and Horace Vernet, but through Géricault, who offered the most remarkable representation of it in his Derby at Epsom.
Nobody questioned the implausibility of these horses galloping belly down, not even the painters known for their equestrian skills! The revelations of Muybridge in 1878 will bring the irrefutable proof that all the attitudes given until then to the galloping horses were unreal, except for the canter of the Greeks which could be related to the first time of the real gallop. Muybridge’s work also provided artists with three positions that they had never suspected existed, and therefore never had the opportunity to represent them (the three other phases of the gallop).
These great discoveries will turn equestrian painting upside down and lead us straight to Degas, to whom we attribute the first “true” gallop in the history of painting, in his painting Horses racing at Longchamp (1873-1875).
Is it to the immense sense of observation of Degas, also a rider and confirmed rider, that we owe this accuracy of movement or to chance? If the painter attached significant importance to the preparation of his compositions, his priorities for the final realization were not less than the lines and the colors whose power of evocation and demotions were to be the only value of the painting. He obviously considered this accuracy of movement, but his approach went beyond that. His subjects will be represented as decorative motifs whose concern for realism will be supplanted by the research of the setting and the play of colors. Degas does not seek resemblances, he gets rid of superfluous details, the movement is no longer measured in “illusion of speed” but in intensity of sensitivity and emotions. In his own way, Degas put an end to realism.
Throughout the twentieth century, equestrian painting will undergo its greatest transformations. Deprived of its primary functions, the horse of modern times will deprive us of all the themes – sources of inspiration for artists – of which it was the protagonist for centuries. A ghost of the past left to the imagination of paintbrushes, he will enter the world of the imagination, today virtual! Sometimes abstract, sometimes surreal, sometimes barely suggested by a rough line… It seems that the concrete representation and the accuracy, whatever the style, have been exclusively delegated to photography and cinema! Neither backward-looking nor pessimistic, horse lovers will always look at the horse in its intrinsic beauty, they will seek out the delightful scenes of daily life and the great portraits that are nowadays only the work of a few artists.
It is quite arbitrarily that we choose as an epilogue to this brief cavalcade through the centuries a painting by Vincent Haddelsey. Far from the quarrels of school, fashion or style, his painting is all poetry and simplicity, freedom and sensitivity put at the service of the horse alone. In this XXIst century where speed is no longer an illusion, so much so that “shortcuts” of all kinds are there to try to control it, it is pleasant to have the opportunity to take the time to observe in this abundance of details, the horses, the nature that surrounds them, their place among men and, this marvelous reality which animates the universe of the horse.
For more information: the horse in art
