Riders on a Road

Riding as transport

A road is a functional statement. Riders on one are going somewhere, and the animal is a means of travel at a pace set by the distance rather than by a clock or a crowd. That is the oldest job a horse holds in this catalogue and the least remarked on, precisely because nothing about it is an event.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1868 and the location line reads Private Collection, the entry on 147 of the 636 records here. The dimensions are not recorded. The record gives Impressionism as the style term, French as the nationality, and brown and red as the measured colour families of the image. A rural landscape heading accompanies Animal Art > Horse.

What separates this from the racing records

The same painter's racing entries here, 20 of the 31 assembled, are organised around a measured event. This one is not. No course, no crowd, no start and no result appears in the title or in the tags, which leaves the animals doing the ordinary thing: carrying people along a road, at whatever speed the road allows.