Rearing Horse

Edwin Henry Landseer · 1817

Medium

Watercolor heightened with white gouache and graphite, on tan laid paper

Original size

10.5 × 12.9 cm (4 3/16 × 5 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Charged with kinetic energy yet held in perfect balance, Landseer's *Rearing Horse* captures an animal mid-motion with a confidence that still feels startling more than two centuries later. Edwin Henry Landseer was already exhibiting at the Royal Academy by the age of thirteen, and this watercolor — made when he was just fifteen — shows why contemporaries treated him as a phenomenon rather than a prodigy. Working in watercolor heightened with white gouache over a graphite underdrawing on warm tan paper, he built up the horse's musculature through layered washes, using the gouache to drag out highlights that give the animal its sense of volume and contained power. The tan ground itself does much of the tonal work, lending the composition a unified warmth that a white sheet could never achieve. Landseer's facility with animal subjects reportedly stemmed from his practice of sketching in the dissecting rooms of the Veterinary College in London, giving his work a grounding in anatomy that sets it apart from more decorative treatments of the same subject. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the delicate tonal layering of the original into the deeper, richer register of oil on canvas, preserving the drama of the rearing pose while giving the work a presence suited to the wall.