Bathing of a Red Horse

Washing, raised to an emblem

Bathing a horse is care work — the ordinary end-of-day maintenance of an animal that has been used. Eight titles in this register name that class of task. What separates this entry from the others is where the catalogue files it: alongside the animal heading it carries mythology and fantasy categories and an abstract-art heading for colour, which in this catalogue marks a picture organised as a design rather than as a report. The job named in the title is the plainest in the register; the treatment recorded around it is not.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1912 and the location is the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The dimensions are 160 x 186 cm, which is large for a subject of daily maintenance. Symbolism is the style term and Russian the nationality attached to the painter. The measured colour families of the image are red and green.

The colour in the title and the colour in the data

The title names the animal as red, and the measured palette of the image returns red as one of its two families. Those are independent facts arriving from different directions — one written by whoever named the work, one computed from the image file — and this register notes the agreement without reading anything further into it.