Horses have appeared in works of art throughout history, frequently as depictions of the horse in battle. The horse appears less frequently in modern art, partly because the horse is no longer significant either as a mode of transportation or as an implement of war. Most modern representations are of famous contemporary horses, artwork associated with horse racing, or artwork associated with the historic cowboy or Native American tradition of the American West. In the United Kingdom, depictions of fox hunting and nostalgic rural scenes involving horses continue to be made.
Horses often appear in artworks singly, as a mount for an important person, or in teams, hitched to a variety of horse-drawn vehicles.
The horse appeared in prehistoric cave paintings such as those in Lascaux, [1] estimated to be about 17,000 years old.
Prehistoric hill figures have been carved in the shape of the horse, specifically the Uffington White Horse, an example of the tradition of horse carvings upon hillsides, which having existed for thousands of years continues into the current age. [2]
The Upper Palaeolithic Vogelherd figurines discovered in Germany, miniature sculptures made of mammoth ivory attributed to paleo-humans of the Aurignacian culture that are among the world's oldest-known works of figurative art, include a figure of a horse.
The equine image was common in ancient Egyptian and Grecian art, more refined images displaying greater knowledge of equine anatomy appeared in Classical Greece and later Roman work. [3] Horse-drawn chariots were commonly depicted in ancient works, for example on the Standard of Ur circa 2500BC.
The Greeks and Romans invented the equestrian statue; the best surviving example being the Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The Horses of Saint Mark are the sole surviving example from Classical Antiquity of a monumental statue of the Quadriga.
The horse was less prevalent in early Christian and Byzantine art, overwhelmed by the dominance of religious themes.
The Renaissance period starting in the 14th century brought a resurgence of the horse in art. Painters of this period who portrayed the horse included Paolo Uccello, Benozzo Gozzoli, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Andrea Mantegna, and Titian. In 1482 the Duke of Milan Ludovico il Moro, commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to create the largest equestrian statue in the world, a monument to the duke's father Francesco, however, Leonardo's horse was never completed, (until it was replicated in the late 20th century).
In the Baroque era, the tradition of equine portraiture was established, with artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Diego Velázquez portraying regal subjects atop their mounts. Equine sporting art also became established in this era, as the tradition of horse racing emerged under Tudor patronage. [3]
George Stubbs, born in 1724, became so associated with his equestrian subjects that he was known as "the horse painter". A childhood interest in anatomy was applied to the horse. He spent eighteen months dissecting equine carcasses and had an engraver produce bookplates of his studies. These anatomical drawings aided later artists.
The mid-18th century saw the emergence of Romanticism, French artists Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix were proponents of this movement and both portrayed the horse in many of their works.
Equine sporting art was popular in the 19th century, with notable artists of the period being Benjamin Marshall, James Ward, Henry Thomas Alken, James Pollard, John Frederick Herring Sr., and Heywood Hardy. Horse racing gradually became more established in France, and Impressionist painter Edgar Degas painted many early racing scenes. Degas was one of the first horse painters to use photographic references. [3] Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of animal motion had a huge influence on equine art, as they allowed artists greater understanding of the horses gaits.
Rosa Bonheur became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais (in French: Le labourage nivernais, le sombrage), [4] and, The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux) [5] (which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur is widely considered to have been the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century. [6]
Isidore Bonheur, the younger brother of Rosa Bonheur, is known as one of the 19th century's most distinguished French animalier sculptors. [7] [8] He modeled his sculptures to catch movement or posture characteristic of the particular species. Isidore Bonheur achieved this most successfully with his sculptures of horses, usually depicted as relaxed rather than spirited, which are among his most renowned works. [9]
Sir Alfred Munnings was an acclaimed painter working in England during the 20th century. He was elected president of the Royal Academy in 1944. He specialised in equine subjects, including horse racing, portraiture, and studies of gypsies and rural life.
Mark Wallinger bought a chestnut racehorse and named her A Real Work of Art, as a readymade. The project also involved having 50 statuettes of a jockey on a chestnut horse, which have been exposed in art galleries around the world. [10]
Military art often depicts the horse in battle and provides some of the earliest examples of the horse in art, with cavalry, horse-drawn chariots, and horse archers all appearing on ancient artifacts.
In the medieval period, cavalry battles and knights on horseback were portrayed by artists including Paolo Uccello and Albrecht Dürer. Uccello's tryptic The Battle of San Romano shows various stages of a battle. Dürer's engraving of "Knight, Death and the Devil", 1513 shows a military subject combined with an allegorical theme.
Sir Alfred Munnings was appointed as a war artist during World War I; he painted both the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and the Canadian Forestry Corps stationed in France. He considered his experiences with the Canadian units to have been among the most rewarding events of his life. [11]
Elizabeth Thompson, known as Lady Butler, was famed for her military art, especially Scotland Forever featuring a dramatic charge by the Royal Scots Greys.
Thoroughbred racing was an inspiration for Romantic and Impressionist artists of the 19th century. Théodore Géricault painted The Derby in 1821 during his stay in England. The Impressionist era coincided with the development of racing in France, Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec all acquired a lasting fascination with racing. Manet showed the excitement and action of the race and Degas concentrated more on the moments before the start. Degas was intensely interested in Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of the horse in motion included in Muybridge's Animal Locomotion , and he copied them in chalk and pencil and used them for reference in his later work. [12]
Generations of artists before Muybridge had portrayed the horse in a 'rocking horse' gallop, with the horse portrayed with both front legs extended forward, and both hind legs extended rearwards. Much more realistic representations were possible after the event of photography and Muybridge's work, but that did not necessarily lead to the impression of movement in the artwork. Luard writing in 1921 compares the running action of an animal with the run and rhythm of an air in music, but the instantaneous moment recorded by a photograph as a detached chord with little meaning or context. [13]
George Stubbs and Alfred Munnings have both left a vast body of work involving the racehorse.
In the 20th century, much of the artwork by John Skeaping involved the racing scene, including life-size bronzes of Hyperion and Brigadier Gerard and watercolours of racecourse action.
Artwork associated with the historic cowboy or Native American tradition of the American west naturally includes many equine subjects. Artists of the American West include Frederic Remington and C.M. Russell who are known for their paintings of equine subjects. Remington was one of the first American artists to illustrate the true gait of the horse in motion (along with Thomas Eakins), as validated by the famous sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. [14] Remington also captured equine drama in his bronze sculptures, his first, Bronco Buster (Williams College Museum of Art), was a critical and commercial success. [15]
Inspired by El Greco's, Saint Martin and the Beggar, c. 1597–1600, Art Institute of Chicago Pablo Picasso introduced horses into his work in 1905-06 notably Boy Leading a Horse , Museum of Modern Art. Franz Marc and others including Susan Rothenberg and Deborah Butterfield beginning in the 1970s used horses as motifs in their paintings and sculpture throughout the 20th century. For a large and complex 20th-century war painting in which a horse is the central dramatic figure, see Guernica by Pablo Picasso. While Impressionist painter Edgar Degas was particularly famous for his paintings of dancers, Degas was also known for his paintings of horses and horse racing.
Hunting scenes have been a common subject matter for equestrian painters. Specialists in fox hunting subjects include Cecil Aldin and Lionel Edwards.
Lucy Kemp-Welch was well known for her depiction of wild and working horses in the landscape.
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
Paolo Uccello, born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. Uccello used perspective to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1416 for a long period of time.
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement begun in Paris that revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and influenced artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
Sir Alfred James Munnings, is known as having been one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken critic of Modernism. Engaged by Lord Beaverbrook's Canadian War Memorials Fund after the Great War, he earned several prestigious commissions, which made him wealthy. Between 1912 and 1914 he was a member of the Newlyn School of artists. His work was part of the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics, the 1932 Summer Olympics, and the 1948 Summer Olympics.
The Battle of San Romano is a set of three paintings by the Florentine painter Paolo Uccello depicting events that took place at the Battle of San Romano between Florentine and Sienese forces in 1432. They are significant as revealing the development of linear perspective in early Italian Renaissance painting, and are unusual as a major secular commission. The paintings are in egg tempera on wooden panels, each over 3 metres long. According to the National Gallery, the panels were commissioned by a member of the Bartolini Salimbeni family in Florence sometime between 1435 and 1460. The paintings were much admired in the 15th century; Lorenzo de' Medici so coveted them that he purchased one and had the remaining two forcibly removed to the Palazzo Medici. They are now divided between three collections, the National Gallery, London, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
An oil sketch or oil study is an artwork made primarily in oil paint in preparation for a larger, finished work. Originally these were created as preparatory studies or modelli, especially so as to gain approval for the design of a larger commissioned painting. They were also used as designs for specialists in other media, such as printmaking or tapestry, to follow. Later they were produced as independent works, often with no thought of being expanded into a full-size painting.
Fauvism is a style of painting and an art movement that emerged in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the style of les Fauves, a group of modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1904 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1905–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain and Henri Matisse.
Isidore Jules Bonheur, best known as one of the 19th century's most distinguished French animalier sculptors. Bonheur began his career as an artist working with his elder sister Rosa Bonheur in the studio of their father, drawing instructor Raymond Bonheur. Initially working as a painter, Isidore Jules Bonheur made his Salon debut in 1848.
The Horse Fair is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Rosa Bonheur, begun in 1852 and first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1853. The artist added some finishing touches in 1855. The large work measures 96.25 in × 199.5 in.
Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin was a French painter, printmaker, and writer. Desboutin always signed himself Baron de Rochefort.
Woman with a Horse is a large oil painting created toward the end of 1911, early 1912, by the French artist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912 and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912. The following year La Femme au Cheval was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913).
The Bathers is a large oil painting created at the outset of 1912 by the French artist Albert Gleizes. It was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1912; the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, Rouen, summer 1912; and the Salon de la Section d'Or, autumn 1912. The painting was reproduced in Du "Cubisme", written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger the same year: the first and only manifesto on Cubism. Les Baigneuses, while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form and multiple perspective characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1912. Highly sophisticated, both in theory and in practice, this aspect of simultaneity would soon become identified with the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deploys these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner". Purchased in 1937, the painting is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Colored Landscape with Aquatic Birds is an oil painting created circa 1907 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques is a Proto-Cubist work executed in a Post-Divisionist style with a unique Fauve-like palette. Metzinger's broad omnidirectional brushstrokes in the treatment of surfaces render homage to Paul Cézanne, while the luscious subtropical imagery in the painting are an homage to Paul Gauguin and Metzinger's friend Henri Rousseau.
Woman with a Fan is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. The work was exhibited in 1914 at Moderni Umeni, S.V.U. Mánes, Prague. A 1914 photograph taken at the exhibition in Prague was published in the magazine Zlatá Praha showing Woman with a Fan hanging next to another work by Metzinger known as En Canot , 1913. Donated by Mr and Mrs Sigmund Kunstadter in 1959, Woman with a Fan forms part of the permanent collection in Gallery 391B at the Art Institute of Chicago, US.
Two Nudes is an early Cubist painting by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. The work was exhibited at the first Cubist manifestation, in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Paris. At this exhibition the Cubist movement was effectively launched before the general public by five artists: Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger. This was the first exhibition during which artists, writers, critics and the public at large encountered and spoke about Cubism. The result of the group show is a succès de scandale.
The Circus is an oil on canvas painting by Georges Seurat. It was his last painting, made in a Neo-Impressionist style in 1890–91, and remained unfinished at his death in March 1891. The painting is located at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912); and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).
Henri Michel-Lévy, was a French impressionist painter.
King of the Forest is an oil-on-canvas painting executed in 1878 by French artist Rosa Bonheur. The work measures 244.8 cm × 175 cm. In the catalogue for an auction sale at Christie's in 2017, it was described as "Perhaps among the most important paintings by the renowned animalier Rosa Bonheur remaining in private hands" and "considered by the artist herself to be one of her masterpieces".
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