Man on Horseback

Ter Borch painted this in 1634, when he was about 17 and the Dutch Republic was still at war with Spain, a war that would not end for another 14 years. A horseman in armour and a broad hat rides away from us, the horse seen squarely from behind, the rider's head bowed and his shoulders slumped. The museum reads that sagging back as the weight of the war. The subject went back a long way for him. His father, the draughtsman Gerard ter Borch the Elder, kept his son's childhood drawings and wrote dates on them, and one from 1625, when the boy was eight, already shows a rider. This panel is one of three known versions of the composition. In the 1930s it hung in the house of Martha Mercer in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and it came to Boston in 1961.