Cheval au galop

Almost everything Géricault painted came back to horses. He was a young man in Napoleon's France, where cavalry was still the height of military glory, and he spent hours at the imperial stables studying how the animals actually moved. This early study of a single galloping horse comes from those first years, around 1810, when he was barely twenty and just teaching himself in Paris. Long before photography could freeze a horse mid-stride and settle the argument, painters simply guessed at the shape of a gallop, and Géricault guessed with more conviction than most. He would die at 32 after a riding fall, so the animals he loved to paint had a hand in his death as well.