Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Draught, at the far end of the period
A horse team is animals harnessed to pull, and the subject is as old as the genre. What is unusual is the date. The draught subjects catalogued in this register run back to the seventeenth century, and 1919 puts this one at the end of that line rather than in the middle of it. The function is unchanged — traction, in harness, in a rural setting — and the painting around it belongs to a completely different century than the coaching pictures in this register.
What the record holds
The catalogue gives 1919 as the date of creation and the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, as the location. The dimensions are 110.5 x 145.5 cm, wider than tall. Expressionism is the style term recorded and Norwegian the nationality attached to the painter. Landscape and rural categories accompany Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.
Why function, not style, organises this register
Filed by style this work sits with Expressionism and nothing else. Filed by what the animals are doing it sits with the plough teams and the carts, three centuries of them, and that grouping tells a reader more about the picture than the style label does.
Sources
3 references- Munch, Edvard — Getty ULAN
Norwegian painter, printmaker, and draftsman, 1863-1944
- Edvard Munch — Wikipedia
Edvard Munch ( MUUNK; Norwegian: [ˈɛ̀dvɑɖ ˈmʊŋk] ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His 1893 work The Scream has become one of the most iconic and acclaimed images in all of Western art. Munch's childhood was ove
- Edvard Munch - Horse Team Ploughing - MM.M.00430 - Munch Museum — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
