Head of a horseman

The rider, detached from the horse

The title names a horseman and then names only his head. That is a fragment, and fragments are their own category in a register organised by function, because the function has been cut away. A horseman is defined by the animal he is on; isolate the head and what remains is a face that a viewer is told, by the title alone, to read as belonging to a mounted man. The record supports the reading no further than that.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1812 as the date of creation and the Musee Bonnat in Bayonne as the location. The dimensions are 36 x 44 cm — small, and with the larger figure second, though the record does not say which measurement is the height. Romanticism is the recorded style and French the nationality attached to the painter. The measured colour family of the image is brown.

The category list is the point here

This work is filed under portraiture and male portraiture only. There is no animal heading of any kind, in a catalogue that attaches one to five hundred and eighty-one of its six hundred and thirty-six horse-register entries. The title says horseman; the record declines to say horse. This entry follows the record and makes no claim about an animal being present.