Officer of the Chasseurs Charging on Horseback (Charging Hussar)

The horse as weapon system

A chasseur was light cavalry, and the title puts him at the charge. That is a completely different job from the one the animal performs in a court portrait. In a charge the horse is not a platform for display but the mechanism of the attack itself: the speed, the mass and the shock are supplied by the animal, and the rider's task is to stay on it and arrive. Cavalry pictures are built around that transfer of force, which is why they read as unstable where the state portraits read as settled.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1812 as the date of creation and a private collection as the location. The dimensions recorded are 17.5 x 23 cm, which is very small for a charge subject; the figure is given as the source gives it, and this entry does not assume a larger canvas behind it. Romanticism is the style term, French the nationality, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

A private location is a weaker record

For works in public collections the location line is checkable against an institution's own catalogue. Here it is not. A picture in private hands moves without announcement, and the entry states only what the last published source said.