Horses in Art: A Short History

04 March 2025

Introduction

Visiting ‘60 ans de Peinture’ celebrated French painter André Brasilier’s forthcoming exhibition at Opera Gallery Paris, one of the first things you might notice is the proliferation of images of horses. From Le cadre noir (circa 1963) to Soir sur le rivage (2024), the exhibition showcases more than six decades of a subject that the artist can’t help returning to time and time again.

“I love horses in every way that they have evolved with us,” the artist told CNN in 2018, “from the dawn of art with the cave paintings, horses have always been a great love for mankind, a symbol of divinity.”^[1] Indeed, the history of art has long mirrored human history more broadly. Horses have featured in both for millenia. Though humanity’s relationship with horses has remained a constant, the animal’s symbolic meaning has changed over time. Developments in art, culture and society have repeatedly repositioned the humble horse, from a symbol of strength and power to a beast of burden and back again.

Here, we invite you to explore with us as we unpack Brasilier’s illuminating quote with a potted history of depictions of horses in art. For as long as humans have been painting and drawing, they have been choosing horses for their subjects; Brasilier’s work is part of one of the longest lineages in the art history

I: Before Canvas

Pech Merle is a hillside cave located in Southern France. It houses the oldest known representations of horses, thought to be around 25,000 years old. Rendered in a pigment derived from clay, two of them stand facing away from each other, each bearing leopard-like spots. These images can still be seen today — monuments to the fact that in this prehistoric age, before art was thought to be separable from everyday life, it featured horses.

Millenia later, in ancient Greece, horses had become strongly associated with power and wealth. Arguably, these resonances have the chariot to thank — adopted from the Hittites, chariots were used in warfare, travel and games: the three cornerstones of upper-class masculinity in Ancient Greece.

Pegasus, the winged white stallion, must be one of the most potent images from the mythology and art of this period. Said to have emerged from the blood of the beheaded Medusa, it’s a creature that was reproduced across coins, mosaics, bronze figurines and pottery, its violent and powerful symbolism leaving an impression on future civilizations up to the present. From airlines to military divisions, Pegasus lives on in today’s culture under a number of different guises.

II: Art and Life

As history wore on, horses became an increasingly prominent feature in societies moving towards industrialisation, their strength harnessed for work, leisure and war. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, paintings depicting horses helping with all of the above. The Battle of San Romano (circa 1435–1460) by Paolo Uccello, for example, shows mounted Florentine and Sienese soldiers at war in 1432.

In art, the advent of oil on canvas made artworks easier to display and transport. Alongside increasingly robust networks of global trade, this allowed art to be traded between collectors and dealers.

By the 17th century, horses had become a part of daily life for many people across cultural and class boundaries. In this context, artists like the Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch thrived, both working under wealthy patrons and selling their paintings to a growing class of art collectors. Ter Borch became known for his portraits of noble subjects as well as his sensitive renderings of the daily lives of working people. His painting Horse Stable (circa 1654) falls into the second category, depicting a horse at a manger with a mostly-hidden man brushing its coat. Light spills into the room, illuminating this tender moment between man and beast. This horse is likely to be a domestic, rather than working, animal, bought by a prosperous owner for leisurely rides around their estate. Ter Borch’s painting shows it tranquil and peaceful, being quietly groomed following after a day’s riding.

The following century, a new movement was beginning to take hold of painting across Europe. Romanticism placed emphasis on the painter’s subjectivity and imagination over lifelike representations of the world around them. It has been argued to be a direct response to the kind of realism in art brought about by the Industrial Revolution — of which Ter Borch’s painting is a prime example. During this period, French painter Théodore Géricault pioneered the application of a romantic lens to equestrian subjects. His painting The Charging Chasseur (circa 1812), which now hangs in the Louvre, depicts a mounted Napoleonic cavalry officer riding a rearing horse. In its combination of classical and romantic aesthetics, it represents a major inflection point in European art.

George Stubbs was an English painter who typified the Romantic sensibility. Known for his interest in, yes, horses, he painted invented scenes that were said to display emotional and metaphysical — rather than material — realities. Whistlejacket (circa 1762), perhaps his best-known painting, depicts a chestnut stallion on its hind legs. Standing at close to three metres tall it is an imposing image that is notably devoid of a backdrop. In a sense, this work could be described as an early mode of abstraction. More than a century before artists including Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint pioneered abstract painting, Stubbs was experimenting with ways of painting his subjects outside of a naturalistic context, replacing it with a swathe of colour. In doing so, he heightens the horse’s majesty.

Hundreds of years later, Brazilian painter Gustavo Nazareno has picked up the legacy of Whistlejacket. His exhibition ‘Afro-Latin Baroque’ at Opera Gallery Miami features a similarly monumental canvas depicting a rearing horse against a plain background. Titled May This Painting Reach Your Heart – A Tribute to Chico Rei (2025), it could be understood as the artist’s way of linking his own life and work to the canon of art history, using the horse’s strength and majesty as a vehicle. “By placing the horse at the center of his composition,” curator Jennifer Inacio writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, “Nazareno pays homage to this symbolic tradition in art history and reclaims it.”

III: From Material to Emotion

Stubbs wasn’t to know that the Romantic shift away from naturalism would signal the beginning of a new epoch in visual culture. 19th century France saw the advent of Impressionism, a movement that harnessed the materiality of paint as a way of representing the world as it is experienced — through the prism of the artist’s unique emotional and perceptual standpoint. Edgar Degas, though he rejected the term at the time, is now understood as one of the founders of Impressionism. He often painted racehorses, capturing them in works including Racehorses at Longchamp (1871–1874), an image that, in its lingering brushstrokes and deep shadows, reflects the feeling of the end of a day of riding more than it captures any particular physical reality.

Not long after, in the early 20th century, German painters ramped up the viscerality once again, leading to Expressionism, a movement whose adherents painted distorted figures and scenes with an immediately-legible emotional intensity. One such painter, Franz Marc — who joined artists including Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter to form the Der Blaue Reiter group, quickly gained prominence within the movement for his images of blue horses. Dreamlike paintings like Blue Horse I (1911) opened the door to a new understanding of realism that goes beyond physical likeness. As art historian Gabi La Cava observed, for Marc, "the feeling that is evoked by the subject matter is most important.”^[2]

IV: Conclusion: The Quest for Beauty

It is by way of Marc that we find our way back to Brasilier. Though more impressionistic in his style, his work embodies the importance of emotion in art, just as Marc suggested it should. By turns, his scenes evoke freedom, tenderness, quietude and unbridled energy — many of these feelings communicated through horses.

The equestrian subjects of his paintings could be Greek cavalry horses or 17th century workhorses. Painted in Brasilier’s characteristically quiet and subtle hands, their many possible historical contexts collapse into one another. They become timeless, Platonic depictions that underscore the artist’s underlying interest; one that might explain art’s historical fixation on horses. “What I’m interested in,” Brasilier told CNN, “is the quest for beauty.”^[3]