Fighting Horses

Two horses rear and clash in the foreground, their forelegs locked, while a groom runs to part them against a bare ground. Théodore Géricault drew the sheet about 1820, near the end of a short career in which the horse was his almost obsessive subject, from his heroic stand-alone studies to the tangled scenes of combat. Worked in watercolor over graphite, the drawing shows the energy and anatomical command that made him the greatest painter of horses of his generation, combining furious motion with close observation.