Fighting Horses (c. 1820): Art, History and Details

Fighting Horses (c. 1820) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Théodore Géricault (French, 1791–1824).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Théodore Géricault turned away from traditional subjects such as mythology and the Bible in favor of modernity, emotion, and drama. He was fascinated by the power and physical beauty of horses and depicted them often. Géricault himself was an avid rider and his paintings and drawings on this theme are characterized by vigor and movement. In this watercolor, he focused on a conflict, in which a groom struggles to separate a pair of fighting horses—a scene that appeared only a few times throughout his many interpretations of similar subjects. A sketchbook, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that the artist carefully studied the animals, including the kicking white stallion at center, in graphite before beginning this finished work.

Object facts

• Title: Fighting Horses
• Date: c. 1820
• Creator attribution: Théodore Géricault (French, 1791–1824)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 21.7 x 29.4 cm (8 9/16 x 11 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1929.13

A detail from the museum

Théodore Géricault began this work with sketches from life, which became a graphite underdrawing beneath the watercolors.

Collection credit

Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Black, C.C. Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings, Porcelain, Bronzes, Decorative Furniture, and Other Works of Art, Lent for the Exhibition in the Bethnal Green Branch of the South Kensington Museum, by Sir Richard Wallace. Exh. Cat. London: Bethnal Green Branch Museum, 1874.
• Catalogue of Pictures, Drawings, and Sculpture of the French School of the Last 100 Years. Exh. Cat. London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1922.
• “Lists of Objects in the Exhibition.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 16, no. 9 (1929): 159–75.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.