Whistlejacket

A horse as the entire subject

Most of the pictures in this register give the animal a job: carrying a ruler, charging, running for a purse, pulling a cart. This one gives it none. The title is the animal's name and nothing else, and the record confirms the reading — the categories are Animal Art and Animal Art > Horse, with no portrait heading, no landscape heading and no human subject attached anywhere in the data. What is being painted is the horse itself, at a scale normally reserved for people.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1762 as the date of creation and the National Gallery in London as the location. The dimensions are 325 x 259 cm, which makes this one of the largest works catalogued here, on the same scale as the royal equestrian portraits in the register. Romanticism is the style term recorded and British the nationality attached to the painter. The measured colour family of the image is ochre. A lion category also appears in the record; nothing in the title supports it, and it is best read as an artefact of automated tagging.

Why the scale is the argument

Size in this period was allocated by importance, and three metres of canvas was what a state portrait or a history painting received. Spending it on a named animal, with no rider and no setting recorded, is a statement about the standing of the horse rather than about the standing of an owner.