Garibaldi on horseback

The mounted portrait at domestic scale

State equestrian portraits in this register run to two and three metres. This one is 83 x 65 cm. Everything else about it is the standard device — a named man, a horse under him, no task in the frame — but at this size the picture is not addressing a hall, a court or a crowd. It is a mounted portrait that can hang in a room, which tells you the format had by this date detached from the institutions that invented it and become available as ordinary pictorial shorthand for public standing.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1860 and the location is the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. The dimensions are 83 x 65 cm. Realism is the recorded style and Italian the nationality attached to the painter. The work is filed under male portraiture and Animal Art > Horse, with no other subject heading, and the measured colour family of the image is yellow.

An artist read across the register

This painter has thirteen works in this catalogue, and most of them are stable interiors, grazing animals and studies rather than portraits of men. Seen against that group, a mounted portrait of a named figure is the outlier in his own body of work here — which is a statement about this catalogue's holdings and not about his career.