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Artwork Details
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Title:Training a Horse
Date:ca. 1756
Medium:Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Dimensions:Image 20.4 X 39.8 cm (7 7/8 X15 5/8)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
Two grooms are training a prized horse from the royal stable. The chestnut stallion is wearing a gold saddlecloth embroidered with scrolling arabesque, a harness, and rich trappings worked in gold and embroidered ribbon. The shuffling groom in the rear holds a knotted whip and a wooden noisemaker, while his companion runs alongside the horse, holding its harness and saddlecloth in his assured grip. The scene takes place out of doors, against an expanse of green grass, indicated by three wide bands of color, progressing to a narrow strip of blue sky at the very top of the composition. The artist has reduced this scene of equestrian training to its essential elements. As a result his painting can be seen as an arrangement of three distinctly articulated shapes, floating against a sea of green, It is the manipulation and placement of abstract elements like these that raise Indian Painting to the high art form that it is. Native rulers were extremely fond of their prized horses, which were often imported from districts in far away Iran, Turkestan, and Iraq, the source of the best equines on the Indian subcontinent. For another portrait of a royal horse, see cat. no. 18.
Inscription: Inscribed on the front along the top border in black ink in Hindi written in devanagari script
Terence McInerney, 1985?
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
