Grey Horse at the Manger

Around 1811 Gericault was 20 and had already left two teachers. Carle Vernet had taught him English sporting painting, where the horse is the subject, and Pierre Guerin gave him a few months of classical drill. After that he set his own programme: copying old masters in the Louvre, and spending the rest of his time in stables. Napoleon's Paris was full of army horses, and Gericault worked from them the way other students worked from the plaster cast. This is one of those studies, oil on paper later laid down on canvas, 26 centimetres by 34, a dappled grey with a white blaze and white socks standing at a hay rack. Nobody commissioned it. It reached the Louvre in 1883, nearly 60 years after his death, in a bequest from the Coutan-Hauguet family.