Il cavaliere senza testa insegue Ichabod Crane

John Quidor made his living painting signs and fire-engine panels, and almost no one bought his canvases while he lived. This one takes the climax of Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a tale already a generation old by 1858. The gangly schoolmaster Ichabod Crane bolts on a borrowed white horse while the Headless Horseman bears down on black, winding up to hurl a pumpkin at his skull. Behind them sits the old Dutch church of Sleepy Hollow under a full moon. Quidor painted it in an America three years short of civil war, and there is something of that dread in the flight. He died largely forgotten. The Smithsonian now counts this among the finest American paintings of its century, the recognition arriving about a hundred years too late for him to enjoy it.