Under Arms

Cavalry charges, hussars and cuirassiers — the horse as the fastest thing on a battlefield for three hundred years.

For three hundred years the horse was the fastest thing on a battlefield, and battle painting is largely the problem of painting speed. Cavalry charges, hussars, lancers and cuirassiers gave artists a subject that was chaotic by nature and had to be composed anyway; the conventions that resulted — the diagonal wedge, the fallen horse in the foreground, the smoke that hides the far end of the line — outlived the tactics they described.