Horseman

In 1881 the Californian railway magnate Leland Stanford came to Paris with the photographs Eadweard Muybridge had made for him of horses in motion. Fast exposures, taken one after another, caught a galloping horse with its legs in positions no painter had drawn. Meissonier had painted horses for decades and was famous for getting them right. He argued with what the pictures showed and then accepted it. That year he painted Stanford's portrait with a volume of the photographs under the sitter's hand, and in November he hosted a showing of the images in his own house.

This horseman is a sketch on a wooden panel about 15 centimetres high, signed only with a monogram, the letters E and M, at the lower right. The museum gives it no date, so there is no telling whether it comes before or after the photographs. It stayed in Meissonier's studio until the sale held after his death, and it reached Boston with a companion, a small study of an officer. In January 1903 the museum paid 755 dollars for the two together.