This work was made for an equestrienne who competes in dressage events. Dressage is a sport that is concerned with the beauty of the horse in motion, and the effortless and imperceptible guidance of the rider. It’s a very old sport, as ancient as cavalry displays of expert horsemanship, and as demilitarized as the contemporary sport is today, watching a horse and rider perform these sorts of exacting figures still provokes a sort of genetic wonderment, as if within myself, there’s a remnant of the Achaean Greek who first saw the invading Dorian on his horse and believed he saw a centaur, or instead a fragment of genetic memory of the Native American who first saw white men riding “big dogs.”
The picture of Roncally and rider is made from equestrian portraits of nobility, and also some “conformation” portraits of exceptional horses. I sliced up the cycle of paintings made for the Buen Retiro palace outside Madrid by Diego Velàsquez, depicting King Philip the IV, his prime minister Olivares, Queen Margarita, and the young Crown Prince Carlos. I also used some pictures by George Stubbs, whose human figures are wooden, and whose landscape scenery quite lifeless, but who was never surpassed as a painter of horses, and in fact his very best works are just images of horses against ambiguous blank fields of olive green or ocher yellow. |
I’m always interested in the history of genres of art, and especially how certain poses or iconographic references convey a symbolic program, meant to reinforce a cultural or political set of norms. The equestrian portrait, and especially the equestrian statue is unusual as an artistic genre, because the norms it supports are virtually the same in every culture, in every nation where it’s found. Look at Chinese ink paintings, Persian miniatures, Roman mosaics, Aztec codices, and most emphatically in paintings during the European age of conquests. What’s common to them all is the hauteur, the literal “hauteur” (from the French word for heighth), as the horseman is raised above the people on foot, and usually the descriptive eye of the artist, and then also the symbolic hauteur, from the ability to control a beast so large and powerful with such small increments of motion, a tug here, a small kick there, and as in the sport of dressage, the smallest pressures of knee and shin.
The role of the equestrian image is a fascinating symbol of national character. There’s been much made of how the American cowboy symbolically represents the United States, how even its least citizens share the cowboy’s ethic of independence, hard work, hell-raising fun, and his code of swift and certain justice. |
That cowboy character is common throughout North and South America, such as the vaqueros and charros of Mexico and the gauchos of Argentina. And in Mongolia, where some think people first tamed horses, the culture also prizes the horseman as a model of Mongolian character. In European art though, the equestrian image is very nearly always associated with the institutions of feudal privilege, or with the military. Even the few exceptions allude to these conventions either in satirical form, such as Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, or by stressing the absence of aristocratic or militaristic trappings, such as Picasso’s dreamy painting of a boy riding a horse from his Rose Period.
In my picture Roncally, I wanted to acknowledge the European history of the equestrian painting, and to show the horse in an advanced attitude called “passage” which if done correctly is like a stately but spirited trot in place. But also I wanted to depict the horse and rider out of formal competitive trappings, in an American landscape, with a live oak tree in the background, a symbol of liberty. |
