Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Not an animal at all
The title names a plaster statuette. Whatever is in this picture is a cast object standing in a room, and the horse in it is a horse only in the sense that a shape refers to one. That makes this the limit case of the whole register. Every other entry catalogues an animal doing something — carrying, pulling, racing, waiting, being sold. Here the function has been emptied out completely and what remains is the horse as a studio exercise: a form kept on hand precisely because it does not move, does not tire and can be drawn at any hour.
What the record holds
The catalogue gives 1886 as the date of creation and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as the location. No dimensions are recorded; the field is empty. Post-Impressionism is the recorded style and Dutch the nationality attached to the painter. The record files the work under Animal Art and Animal Art > Horse and nothing else, and the measured colour family of the image is yellow.
An animal heading on an object
Elsewhere in this register the animal tag turns up on titles naming oxen, bulls and wheelbarrows, and this register flags it each time. Here the tag is arguably right and arguably not: the subject is a horse, and it is also plaster. It is a good illustration of how little a category heading settles on its own.
Sources
2 references- Vincent van Gogh — Wikipedia
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ vɑŋ ˈɣɔx] ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he c
- WLANL - MicheleLovesArt - Van Gogh Museum - Plaster figure of a horse, 1886 — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
