A Moroccan Saddling a Horse

Tacking up, in a different tradition

The act in the title is the same one an artilleryman performs elsewhere in this register: a saddle going onto a horse that is standing to be handled. What differs is the setting the record attaches to it. This work is filed under Orientalism, a nineteenth-century European category for pictures of North Africa and the Near East, and that label describes the painting's tradition rather than the place itself. The function of the animal is unchanged — waiting to be ridden — and it is the surrounding subject matter that has been relocated.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1855 as the date of creation and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as the location. The dimensions are 56 x 47 cm, taller than wide. Orientalism is the style term recorded and French the nationality attached to the painter. Alongside Animal Art > Horse the record carries cultural heritage, mythology and fantasy categories, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Reading a style label as a label

Orientalism in a catalogue field is a genre term for a body of European pictures, and it carries the assumptions those pictures were made with. This register records the term because the source records it, and treats it as information about the painting rather than about the people or the animals depicted.