Grazing horses

Grazing, which is the animal entirely off duty

No human is named in this title and no equipment is implied. Grazing is the one condition in this register in which the horse is doing something for itself: feeding, at its own pace, on ground it has been turned out onto. Every other function catalogued here — carrying, pulling, racing, hunting, standing to be admired — is a use. This is the absence of use, and a register organised around function needs the zero point as much as it needs the extremes.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1865 as the date of creation and the Pinacoteca metropolitana di Bari as the location. The dimensions are 26.5 x 44 cm, small and wider than it is tall by the order the record gives. Realism is the recorded style and Italian the nationality attached to the painter. The categories are landscape, rural and Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Two entries, one collection, one painter

The other work this register records at the same Bari collection is by the same hand and shows a stable interior, dated fifteen years earlier. Housed and turned out: the two halves of the animal's non-working life, held in one place. That is a fact about this catalogue's holdings and nothing more, but it is the kind of pairing that makes a register worth reading across rather than down.