Turkish Horse in a Stable

Géricault was barely 20 when he painted this, a student still, and already the horse was the thing he cared about most. He had trained under Carle Vernet, a painter of horses and hunts, and he spent hours in stables and at the track studying how the animals actually stood and moved. Here he gives you a single horse in its stall, turned so the light rakes across its muscled flank, the space around it kept plain and dim. Within a year or two he would send a mounted cavalry officer to the Paris Salon and make his name. Horses stayed with him to the end. He died in 1824, at 32, his health broken partly by falls from the saddle.