The Epsom Derby

A named meeting, which makes this a racing picture

The title names the Epsom Derby, and that single fact fixes the category. Racing pictures are commercial pictures in origin: a racehorse represented money, and paintings of the turf were made for owners, for breeders and for a public that followed results. The horse's function in them is neither ceremonial nor military. It is competitive, and the composition is organised around speed and around the crowd that came to watch it.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1821 as the date of creation and the Louvre in Paris as the location. The dimensions are 122.5 x 92 cm. Romanticism is the style term recorded, French the nationality attached to the painter, and the measured colour family of the image is yellow. The work is filed under Animal Art and Animal Art > Horse alone — no portrait category, no landscape category, which in this catalogue is the signature of a picture whose subject is the animals.

A convention worth naming

Before instantaneous photography, painters of the turf drew the gallop as a single stretched leap, forelegs thrown forward and hind legs back, with all four feet clear of the ground. It is a pictorial convention rather than an observation of how a horse actually moves, and it runs through racing pictures of this period as a matter of course.