Horse Artillery

Breitner had been drawing soldiers and horses since he was a student in The Hague, and at 23 he was hired to paint the cavalry exercising on the beach in the marine painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag's great panorama of Scheveningen. In 1885 and 1886 he turned the same fascination on the Horse Artillery, an elite mounted corps nicknamed the Yellow Riders for the braid on their jackets. Here they come down off the dunes at full gallop, almost straight at us. The sand kicked up by the front horses hides the rows behind, so the riders further back dissolve into dust. What survives the haze are the colour accents the museum points out, black and red on the tall fur caps and yellow on the uniforms, repeated from rider to rider.