Tethered Horse

Tethered is a category of its own

Between the stall and the job there is a third state: the animal held in the open by a rope, standing where it has been put, neither housed nor employed. Tethering is how a working horse waits. It is also the condition in which an animal can be looked at for as long as anyone likes, without the cooperation of a stable or the interruption of a task, and the studies in this catalogue return to it often.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1881 and the location is a private collection. The dimensions are 49 x 59 cm. Impressionism is the style term and French the nationality attached to the painter. The record files the work under Animal Art and Animal Art > Horse and nothing else — no portrait, no landscape, no cultural heading — which in this catalogue is the signature of a picture whose subject is the animal alone. The measured colour families of the image are yellow and orange.

Orange, and why the palette field is worth reading

Orange is rare in this register's colour data: it is returned for nine of the six hundred and thirty-six works catalogued here, where yellow, brown and ochre dominate. The colour family is a measurement taken from the image file rather than a description written by anyone, which makes it one of the few fields in this catalogue that nobody's judgement has passed through.