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Your galleryFighting Horses
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Follow the white horse’s twisting body to the dark horse rearing at right, then find the groom raising his arm behind them.
Géricault, himself a keen rider, drew and painted horses many times. Here a groom tries to separate two fighting horses, a subject the Cleveland Museum of Art says he treated only a few times. A sketchbook now at the Art Institute of Chicago shows that he studied these animals, including the white stallion, in pencil before making this watercolor.
watercolor over graphite · Sheet: 21.7 x 29.4 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Romanticism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Fighting Horses
- Artist
- Théodore Géricault (French, 1791–1824)
- Date
- c. 1820
- Medium
- watercolor over graphite
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 21.7 x 29.4 cm (8 9/16 x 11 9/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.