Il bagno del cavallo rosso

Petrov-Vodkin finished this in 1912, and at first people argued about the colour. No horse is that red, a deep, glowing scarlet that has nothing to do with any animal you could lead into a river. The boy riding it is pale and slack, almost passive, carried rather than steering. Painted two years before the First World War and five before the revolution, it struck viewers afterwards as a kind of premonition. The artist himself, when the fighting began in 1914, is said to have remarked, so that is why I painted the red horse. The pose of horse and rider comes straight from old Russian icons of Saint George, which Petrov-Vodkin had studied closely.