Two Knights in Armor

Armour, painted four centuries after armour

The title names two figures in armour, which makes this a costume subject: a modern picture reaching for a category that had stopped existing as anything but a subject. When a painter of 1900 puts men in armour on horses, the animal is not performing a contemporary function. It is carrying a historical one, borrowed and reconstructed, and the picture is a statement about a period rather than a record from inside it. This register files that under the same heading as the cavalry entries and then notes the distance.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1900 as the date of creation and a private collection as the location. No dimensions are recorded. Impressionism is the style term and French the nationality attached to the painter. The categories are landscape, rural and Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour family of the image is ochre.

Where this sits in one painter's group

Twenty works by this painter are catalogued in this register, and eight of them carry the date 1881 — stable, racecourse and harness subjects clustered in a single year. This entry is at the far end of his run here. What that shows is the shape of this catalogue's holdings, not the shape of his working life, and the difference is worth stating.