Cinque cavalli visti dalla groppa

Notes:
PROVENIENZA: Milano, collezione privata. This lot is sold with a valid Export License. According to Dott. Bruno Chenique, the present work – unpublished – dates 1811-1812, that is during Géricault’s artistic training, immediately prior to his participation to the 1812 Salon with An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging, the artist’s first truly successful work. In fact, as Dott. Chenique had argued, this should also be the correct date for the series of studies of horses viewed from the back, the most famous of which are the canvases with Five horses viewed from the back in a stable, held at the Louvre, and the Twenty-four horses viewed from the back in a private collection in Fontainebleau (1). Whilst Lorenz Eitner (2) and Germain Bazin (3) date them around 1813-1814, thus after the experience gained through the Officer of the Imperial Horse, Chenique suggests that this date should be revised as rooted in a partially unreliable source, that is to say Charles Clément’s first catalogue of Géricault’s oeuvre, published as a series of articles between 1866 and 1867, later collated in a revised edition in 1879 (4). As a matter of fact, Clément could have only relied on fragmentary and partial accounts concerning the very first years of Géricault’s training, notwithstanding the difficulties connected to the reconstruction of an exact chronology for the artist, for both his working method and habit of leaving his works unsigned and undated. On the contrary, our most ancient source, the biographical note included in the Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains of 1830 (5), at a time when Géricault was still alive, corroborates the date proposed by Chenique. Beyond the various dates put forward by a wealth of scholars over the years, what has been undisputed, as confirmed by different sources, is the place where Théodore Géricault would have gone to execute his studies of horses, that is the stables of the barrack of Courbevoye, not far from Versailles. Here, Géricault would have produced sketches dal vero (from life), drawn using charcoal and oil, including the series of the Horses viewed from the back and, therefore, the oil on cardboard here presented. Through these, the artist aims to turn more traditional representations of horses, hitherto rather idealized, into truthful portraits, capable of eternalizing the lively features of each animal. In this endeavour, Géricault was influenced by his first master, Carle Vernet, the studio of whom he had entered in 1808. The young Géricault shared with Carle and his son Horace a passion for horses, a passion which would eventually prove lethal when, in 1824, a neglected fall from a horse, combined with a venereal disease, led him to a slow and painful death. Despite the few years spent in Vernet’s workshop, Géricault did not detach himself from his master’s works, which he kept copying for study purposes even later in his career. The studies of the Horses viewed from the back may, therefore, have been executed immediately after Géricault left Carle Vernet’s studio for that of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, in which Eugène Delacroix, a friend and admirer of Géricault’s, would have also received his training. In Dott. Chenique’s view, our work should be regarded as “one of the first” in “this important series of horses viewed from the back in a stable, started in Guérin’s workshop” (6). Nevertheless, unlike other works set in a stable, Five horses viewed from the back is set outdoor, even if under cosy tree shadows. The animals are probably portrayed while drinking by a stream, excluded from the viewer’s sight; in the “undergrowth, amidst nature, sunrays fall gently” onto their backs (7). To the right, on the foreground, a wooden panel hung on a tree bears a scarcely legible inscription: “La Rivière / [illegible word] cheva[ux]”. “This space allows Géricault to neglect anecdotal details in order to focus on the pictorial rendition of a back or a chest, adopting an ‘in-depth close-up, enhanced by the play of black and brown hues, which denote both the shadows and the backdrops’” (8). A pictorial rendition based on “quick, fluid and thick brushstrokes”, ideal to convey the translucency of well-groomed coats and the tactility of finely combed horsehair. The analysis conducted by the firm Lumiere Technology of Paris, thanks to the innovative technique known as Layer Amplification Method (LAM), recently adopted for Leonardo da Vinci’s Monna Lisa, has unveiled a set of small yet significant pentimenti in the composition: one of the tree branches to the top right was probably originally conceived as the beam of a rack, leading us to suppose a different setting, likely the inside of a stab. Analogously, the head of the brown bay horse on the far right, now pointed towards the viewer, was initially directed towards the other steeds, while the head of a horse inserted between the first and second horses on the left has been erased, possibly with the aim of “drawing attention to this collection of backs, with their variety of colours and the vividness produced by the sun”, falling from the left-hand side (9). Furthermore, the verso of the painting seems extremely interesting to pinpoint Géricault’s artistic career, as it represents The Death of Hippolytus, a classical subject derived from Racine’s tragedy Phèdre of 1677 (Act V, scene 6). Executed with a few touches of charcoal, the “vigorous” drawing portrays Hippolytus facing the ground, half-way in the fall from his chariot, overturned by a pair of wild horses, frightened by the sea monster represented to the right. In this, Dott. Chenique sees the influence of two chief models of the same subject, a painting by Rubens and a print by Géricault’s master Carle Vernet (10). Chenique remarks the presence of a small oil on canvas in the Museum of Montpellier, which entered the collection after 1876 as an autograph work by Géricault, although this authorship has been more recently rejected by Philippe Grunchec (11) and Germain Bazin (12). Beyond this controversy on the work’s authenticity, a matter on which Dott. Chenique will eventually disclose his opinion upon closer investigation, the present sketch betrays Géricault’s interest in this tragic subject, and may be “convincingly” compared, on stylistic ground, to the drawing held in Geneva, in the Jean Bonna collection, known as Etude pour la Course des chevaux libres (Study for the Race for free horses), la Mossa (13).      

1. Bruno Chenique, Un tableau inédit de Théodore Géricault. Cinq chevaux vus par la croupe. Une étude par Bruno Chenique, Paris 2014, pp. 12-15
2. Lorenz Eitner, Géricault, sa vie, son œvre, Paris 1991, pp. 47-50
3. Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault. Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, vol. III, La gloire de l’Empire et la Première Restauration, Paris 1989, p. 17
4. Charles Clément, “Gericault (premier article)” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, tomo XXII, 1867, pp. 229-230 and Géricault. Étude biographique et critique avec le catalogue raisonné de l’œvre du maître, Paris 1879, pp. 16-17
5. Anonymous author [Louis-François L’Heritier], “Gericault (Jean-Louis-Théodore-André)” in Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains, Paris 1830, vol. II, pp. 1861-1863
6. Chenique, 2014, p. 16
7. Chenique, 2014, p. 15
8. Chenique, 2014, p. 16 quoting Jean Clay, Le Romantisme, Paris 1980, p. 306
9. Chenique, 2014, p. 16
10. Chenique, 2014, p. 17
11. Philippe Grunchec, Tout l’œvre peint de Gericault, Paris 1978, p. 137, n. A 98 (ill.)
12. Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault. Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, vol. II, L’ œvre, période de formation, Paris 1987, p. 508, n. 539 (ill.)
13. Bazin, vol. II, 1987, p. 242 fig. 199 and Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault. Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, vol. IV, Le voyage en Italie, Paris 1990, p. 189 n. 1339 (ill.)