Stable interior

The stable, at one of the smallest scales in this batch

A stable is where the animal is not working. That makes stable interiors the most functionally empty subject in this register and, for the same reason, the one where the animal is most available to be looked at. The pictures in this class are about housing, light and the fact of a large creature standing still indoors. This one is 21 x 27 cm — a format small enough to hold in one hand, given to a subject that a court portrait would have taken three metres to state.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1850 as the date of creation and the Pinacoteca metropolitana di Bari as the location, one of two works in this register recorded there and both by this painter. Realism is the style term and Italian the nationality attached to the painter. Alongside Animal Art > Horse the record carries landscape, rural and — unusually — still life headings, and the measured colour family of the image is ochre.

A still-life tag on a living subject

The still-life heading is not obviously wrong here. A stable interior is a room full of objects with an animal standing in it, and the category tells you something about how the picture is organised even if it misdescribes what is alive. This register reports the tag and lets the reader weigh it, which is the treatment every category heading in this catalogue gets.