Black Horse

A black horse stands alone on a bare sheet of paper, head lowered, one foreleg lifted, with no landscape around it at all. Bierstadt painted it in oil on paper, later mounted on board, a little under half a metre wide, and signed it at the lower left with his initials run together in a monogram before the rest of his name. The museum dates it only roughly, to about 1859, when he was around 29 and still making his way as a painter. Horses, deer and buffalo would later fill the foregrounds of his big western canvases. This study left his hands at some point and turned up in a private collection in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1948 a New York dealer sold it to the collectors Maxim and Martha Karolik, and it came to the museum with their collection of American paintings made before 1865.