Rearing Horse with a Red Saddlecloth

Gericault was barely 21 when he painted this in 1812, the year he burst onto the Paris Salon with a huge canvas of a Napoleonic cavalry officer charging on a rearing horse. Horses were the passion of his short life, and he studied them endlessly. This is a smaller, closer study of the same idea, a single horse reared up on its hind legs with a bright red cloth across its back, set against open sky. 1812 was the year Napoleon marched on Moscow, and the French army and its cavalry were everywhere in people's minds. Gericault would be dead at 32, from a fall from a horse and the illness that followed. This study stayed in his home region and hangs today in the museum of Rouen.