Head of a white horse

Gericault loved horses more than any other subject, and he painted this pale head as a young man, before the huge shipwreck scene, the Raft of the Medusa, made his name. Oddly, there seems to have been no horse in the room. The Louvre notes that he worked it up from a print by Carle Vernet, the older painter in whose studio he had trained, rather than from life. The head looms out of a deep dark ground, the eye large and almost human, and more than one viewer has wondered whether Gericault was half painting himself. Horses ran through his whole short life. He was a bold, reckless rider, and in 1824, at 32, he died after a series of falls from the saddle.