The 12 Most Famous Horse Paintings, from Whistlejacket to Blue Horse I

Most famous horse paintings are really portraits of men. A king in armor, a general on a rearing stallion, an emperor riding out of a victory. The horse is there to make the rider look larger than life. Then, around 1762, George Stubbs painted a racehorse with no rider, no saddle and no scenery, almost three meters tall, and the horse became the whole point.

The twelve paintings below cover five centuries, from a Florentine battle to a blue foal from 1911. They hang in four countries. Painters have copied them for generations too, which is why hand-painted versions of the great horse paintings are one way to live with them. Whistlejacket comes first because it earned the spot. The other eleven follow in the order they were painted.

Read the list top to bottom and you can watch the horse change jobs. In the Renaissance and Baroque pictures it carries a king and says something about him. With Stubbs it becomes the sitter. The French Romantics turn it into pure energy, all flaring nostrils and flying manes. Degas makes it a shape moving through light, and by the time Marc paints it blue, it stands for an idea. Same animal, five centuries of arguments about what a painting is for. That's why a list of horse pictures makes a surprisingly good short history of Western painting, and why the choices below lean toward works that changed how painters saw the animal.

Who is considered the most famous horse painter?

George Stubbs. Other painters made greater pictures that happen to include horses, but nobody built a reputation on the animal itself the way he did. Between 1756 and 1758 he spent eighteen months in Lincolnshire dissecting horses, layer by layer, and drawing what he found. The book came out in 1766 as The Anatomy of the Horse, and nobody who painted horses in Britain could ignore it afterward.

Twelve famous horse paintings, one by one

1. Whistlejacket, George Stubbs, about 1762

Whistlejacket was an Arabian chestnut stallion who won his biggest race at York in August 1759 and then went to stud. His owner, the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, commissioned the portrait. The canvas is 296.1 × 248 cm, and the horse rears against a blank, pale ground.

People love the story that Stubbs meant to add King George III on its back and never got round to it. There's no evidence for that. The empty background looks deliberate, and it's the reason the picture still feels modern. You get the coppery coat, the auburn mane, the rolling eye, and nothing else. The National Gallery bought the canvas in 1997 with lottery money and private gifts. Stand close and it's bigger than you.

2. The Battle of San Romano, Paolo Uccello, about 1438–40

This is the oldest work on the list and the strangest. The battle took place on 1 June 1432, part of Florence's war with Lucca, Milan and Siena. Leonardo Bartolini Salimbeni ordered three large panels of it; in 1484 Lorenzo de' Medici took them for his own palace. Today one is in the Uffizi, one in the Louvre, and the London panel of the three measures 182 × 320 cm.

Uccello was obsessed with perspective, and you can see him testing it: broken lances laid out on the ground like a grid, a fallen soldier foreshortened (not quite correctly). The horses are round and stiff, closer to carousel horses than warhorses. That's the charm. It's a mathematician's battle.

3. Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, Anthony van Dyck, about 1638–9

Van Dyck painted Charles I many times, and this is the biggest: 367 × 292.1 cm. The king rides a heavy brown horse in a formal dressage pose, the mane falling in curls that echo his own hair. A page holds out his helmet, and a Latin tablet names him King of Great Britain. The picture was made for the king's own collection, and every inch of it argues that he was born to rule. When the National Gallery paid £17,500 for it in 1885, the price set off a public argument.

4. The Polish Rider, Rembrandt, about 1655

Nobody knows who the young man is. He sits on a thin, bony horse, holds a war hammer, and rides through darkening country toward something we can't see. He may be a real person, a soldier from a story, or no one at all. The Polish connection starts in 1791, when Michał Kazimierz Ogiński took it to Poland. Henry Clay Frick acquired it in 1910 through the critic Roger Fry, and it has stayed in New York since. At 116.8 × 134.9 cm it's modest next to the royal portraits, and far more mysterious.

5. Bonaparte Crossing the Grand Saint-Bernard Pass, Jacques-Louis David, 1800

The rearing horse under Napoleon, the cloak snapping in the wind, the raised finger, the names Hannibal and Charlemagne carved into the rocks at the bottom. Every piece of this 260 × 221 cm canvas is propaganda, and it worked. The first version was commissioned by the king of Spain, who wanted good relations with France, and it now hangs at Malmaison.

David had been given a single sitting with the young general in late 1797, and came away declaring, "Bonaparte est mon héros" (Bonaparte is my hero). You can feel that in the picture. The horse does all the dramatic work while the rider sits perfectly calm, one hand pointing up the mountain.

6. The 1821 Derby at Epsom, Théodore Géricault, 1821

Here Géricault takes on an English race. Four jockeys race across the downs, the horses stretched out flat with front legs reaching forward and back legs kicking straight behind. It looks thrilling and it's anatomically impossible. No horse gallops like that, as photography showed decades later. Géricault painted what speed felt like. The canvas is small, 92 × 123 cm, and the state bought it for the Louvre in 1866.

7. The Horse Fair, Rosa Bonheur, 1852–55

Stand in front of this and the first thing you notice is size: 244.5 × 506.7 cm, more than five meters of heavy horses and grooms kicking up dust at a Paris horse market. Bonheur (1822–1899) gives the animals a weight the royal portraits never bother with. These are working animals, and they're barely under control.

Cornelius Vanderbilt gave the canvas to the Metropolitan Museum in 1887. Go early, before the crowds, and you can hear yourself think in front of it.

8. Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, Eugène Delacroix, 1860

In January 1832 Delacroix went to Morocco with the Comte de Mornay's diplomatic mission. He came home with notes, watercolors and objects, and kept painting Moroccan subjects until his death in 1863. This stable fight came almost thirty years after the trip, painted at Champrosay for the dealer Estienne. Two stallions rear and bite while a groom runs in to separate them. It's only 65.5 × 81 cm, but the brushwork is loose and fast, and the fight seems about to spill out of the frame. It went to the Louvre with the Camondo bequest in 1911 and hangs today at the Musée d'Orsay.

9. 1807, Friedland, Ernest Meissonier, about 1861–75

This is Meissonier's big Napoleon picture. Cuirassiers thunder past the emperor, sabers raised in salute, while he sits still on a rise with his staff. Look at the legs: every horse is caught mid-stride, and each buckle and strap is painted with a jeweler's care. The canvas measures 135.9 × 242.6 cm, and Henry Hilton gave it to the Met in 1887, the same year the museum received The Horse Fair. It's a useful counterpoint to Géricault. Meissonier wanted accuracy; Géricault wanted feeling.

10. The Parade (Racehorses before the Stands), Edgar Degas, about 1866–68

Racing comes back again and again in Degas's work, and this is one of his first racing pictures. Nothing happens. Jockeys in bright silks walk their horses in front of the grandstand before the start, and one horse at the back shies, the only sign that the race is about to begin. Degas cared more about the shapes of horse and rider against the light than about who wins. He was treating the racetrack the way he'd treat the ballet: as rehearsal, waiting and nerves. It's at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

11. A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington, 1889

Harper's Weekly sent Remington west to cover the Army's campaigns against Geronimo, and he came back to paint a scene that never happened. Eight cowboys gallop toward a stand of trees, one hit and falling, with pursuers closing in behind. It's 48 1/4 × 84 1/8 inches and full of dust and motion. The painting shaped how people pictured the American West, and the museum in Fort Worth that owns it now points out how one-sided that picture is: the Native riders exist only as attackers.

12. Blue Horse I, Franz Marc, 1911

The list ends with a foal. Marc paints it blue, standing upright with its head tipped to one side like a thoughtful teenager, against hills of red, green, yellow and violet. For Marc, blue was the color of the spiritual, and the animal here stands for something purer than people. He gave up painting what a horse looks like and painted what he thought it meant.

It's 112 × 84.5 cm, part of the Koehler foundation's 1965 gift to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, where it hangs with the rest of the Blue Rider group.

Who else is famous for painting horses?

Stubbs, Bonheur, Géricault and Degas are the four names that come up most, and all four are here. After them, look for Alfred Munnings, the English painter of racehorses and hunts, whose work belongs to the twentieth century. Rembrandt and Van Dyck don't count as horse painters in the strict sense; they painted people who happened to be riding. Marc is the odd one out, a modernist who painted horses and cows in colors no real animal has.

If you're after the wider set of paintings people recognize from across a room, David's Napoleon is one of the few horse pictures that belongs there too.

A horse for your own wall

Every painting on this list can be painted again by hand in oil, at the size that fits your room. Start with the studio's horse paintings, all done by hand, from Stubbs to Marc. If you're weighing size, canvas and framing, read what to check before you order one.

Sources

• National Gallery, Whistlejacket
• National Gallery, The Battle of San Romano
• The Frick Collection, The Polish Rider
• Louvre, Un chef charismatique
• The Met, The Horse Fair
• Musée Delacroix, Biography
• Amon Carter Museum, A Dash for the Timber
• Lenbachhaus, Blaues Pferd I