Colonel George K. H. Coussmaker, Grenadier Guards

An officer, a horse, and a setting

The title names Colonel George K. H. Coussmaker of the Grenadier Guards, which makes this a military portrait, and the record files it under male portraiture together with Animal Art > Horse. It is not a battle picture. The regimental identification supplies the sitter's standing, and the horse supplies the rest of what an eighteenth-century portrait of a serving officer was expected to supply: scale, an outdoor setting, and the suggestion of a man at ease with an animal that most viewers would not have been at ease with.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1782 and the location is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The dimensions are 234.5 x 143 cm. Alongside the horse the record carries botanical categories, tree among them, so the setting registered in the catalogue is outdoors rather than in a studio interior. Rococo is the recorded style, British the nationality, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Portrait, not action

Nothing in the record places this animal in motion or at work. Read against the cavalry entries in this register, where the horse is doing something violent and specific, the difference is the point: here the animal is an attribute of the sitter, and the picture is arranged so that the man reads first.