Mare at a cart

The working animal, not the portrait

Giovanni Fattori's small canvas of 1890 shows a mare at a cart, and the catalogue files it under animal art and horse. The distinction that organises this catalogue is function: a court equestrian portrait raises the animal into a pose borrowed from monuments, while a draught horse in harness is doing a job. This is the second kind. The horse is attached to a vehicle, which is the whole of what the record establishes about the scene.

Scale as evidence

At 25.5 by 35 cm the panel is small — closer to a study than to an exhibition piece, and among the smallest works in this catalogue that carry a horse as their subject. Fattori worked at this scale often, and the record gives no indication that this one was intended otherwise.

What the record holds

Dated 1890, filed under Realism, in a private collection. The measured palette is red, which for a harnessed animal in an Italian landscape is unusual enough to be worth noting and impossible to explain from a catalogue entry alone.