Horse Frightened by Lightning

Delacroix made this small watercolour around 1824, the year he showed his huge, harrowing Massacre at Chios at the Paris Salon and announced himself as the wild man of French Romantic painting. Working on those big history scenes had convinced him he needed to understand the horse from the inside, its anatomy and its panic, and he returned to the animal again and again. Here a single horse rears on an empty shore as lightning splits an almost unreal blue sky, more a study in raw fear than the portrait of a particular beast. For the Romantics the horse stood for exactly this: power and nobility with something untamed underneath. He gave the sheet to a friend, Baron Schwiter, whose own portrait Delacroix also painted.