LEVITATING HORSES

When Art found Truth wanting

I’ve never had much contact with horses. As a child in the fifties I’d see a few in the street, hauling rag and bone carts or milk floats, but they were pathetic, docile creatures and I was passionately attracted to cars, trains, trucks and planes. It’s not in life, but in art that the horse has impressed me most, as its representation evolved over time, acquiring meaning in the narratives of cultural history.

The Battle of San Romano, by Paolo Uccello, 1455. Janson’s History of Art, 1962

Uccello’s white horses rear up dramatically in The Battle of San Romano (1455), yet their attitude is stiff, like equestrian statues, solid objects in a field of vision that’s presented as coherent mathematical space, via the new invention of linear perspective. This, the prancing horse pose, is ancient and worldwide. In Western art it’s appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1066), Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), and the Ferrari logo (1932), to name but a few.

The Four Horsemen, Albrecht Dürer, third of 15 woodcuts in The Apocalypse series, 1498. Anatomy of Printing, John Lewis, 1970

Albrecht Dürer mounted Famine, Pestilence and War on prancing steeds, with front legs tucked under, but by cleverly obscuring their rear legs, they may well be jumping, which gives a convincing impression of motion, or even flight, amidst the turmoil of the print’s design.

The Horse in Motion, Edwearde Muybridge, 1878. The History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977.

In the 1870s Eadwearde Muybridge added sequential imagery to the visual description of equine motion, with chronophotography that dissected the gallop, answering a question that had long puzzled artists (not to mention Leland Stanford, the horse-breeding proponent of Muybridge’s experiment): What are the correct positions of a horse’s legs at speed, too rapid for the eye to discern?

Passing the Stand, Nathaniel Currier, 1855, large folio chromolithograph. Currier & Ives’ America, Crown Publishers, New York, 1952.

Before Muybridge, horses in motion were shown with all four feet off the ground, whether trotting (Currier, above) or racing with legs outstretched in the classic hobby-horse position (The Derby Galop, at top of page). As Muybridge discovered, that was quite wrong—the only time all four hooves are off the ground is when the legs are bunched up underneath the animal. Artists had been well aware that racing horses do, of course, occasionally make contact with terra firma, but that didn’t look right—not exciting or speedy enough—hence the “flying gallop.” After Muybridge, horses in motion continued to be shown with all four feet off the ground, for the same reason.

Scotland Forever! by Elizabeth Southerden Thompson (Lady Butler), 1882, oil on canvas. The Battle of Waterloo, J. Christopher Herald, American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1967.

Elizabeth Thompson (later known as Lady Butler) was a stickler for accuracy, a Realist artist famous in her day for depicting the hardships and dangers endured by ordinary soldiers. In the preparation of The Defense of Rorke’s Drift (1880), the heroes who had fought in that battle the previous year re-enacted the event for her, in the uniforms they’d worn. The resulting painting was “…as nearly to the life as possible,” she wrote in her autobiography.

With Scotland Forever! the artist imagined an even more visceral experience for the spectator: a cavalry charge by the Royal Scots Greys in the Battle of Waterloo (67 years earlier), viewed head on. Just as J. M. W. Turner had been lashed to the mast of a boat in a storm at sea, as research for Snow Storm (1848), Thompson, though not actually witnessing any battles, was nonetheless able to position herself in front of a cavalry charge in a training maneuver by her husband’s regiment, to experience the action closely. She was no doubt also informed by Muybridge’s photos of equine locomotion, which had gained worldwide recognition in 1878. With great ingenuity, the horses in Scotland Forever! exhibit the range of gait documented in his work—yet those hooves which should be caught pounding the ground, such as the left front foot of the grey at left… well, close enough. Truthy, in fact.

Frederic Remington’s A Dash for the Timber (1889) also employed knowledge of Muybridge, showing six horses galloping with various iterations of correct gait; however, for dramatic effect they all appear to be in unsupported transit, heightened by shadows underneath. Full flight, indeed.

In for it, engraved by J. E. Jones from a painting by J. Hilyard, mid 19th century.

The airborne horse was entirely conventional, a typical example being In for it, a print, suitable for framing, made from a painting by obscure artist J. Hilyard, “engraved expressly for The Ladies’ Repository,” a monthly magazine published by the Methodist Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, mid 19th century.

Hark Away, Thomas Blinks, lithograph from the series A Day with the Oakley, 1893. Note the fallen horse at right and the lady mounted side-saddle, also featured in a matching print.

The effect of levitation extended to dogs in sporting prints, conjuring this marvelous scene of a whole hunting party drifting by, hovering in air. Certainly, there is reality as defined by technology, but there is also something to be said for artistic licence. ●