1.7 The horses
An equestrian statue may be dedicated to the rider, but the portrayal of the horse is no less important. Both have to be in harmony with each other. In a good equestrian statue, one should recognize the character of the rider from the way the horse has been sculpted. For instance, a horse at rest gives a sense of authority to the rider. A rearing horse combines well with a dynamic rider.
1.7.1 Rearing horses
It is a little-known fact that in 1630, the Austrian sculptor Caspar Gras had already created a rearing equestrian without using the tail of the horse as a support point. The statue depicts Archduke Leopold V and stands on top of the Leopoldsbrunnen fountain in Innsbruck, Austria. The equestrian monument is of a prancing horse on its hind legs. The balance of the statue was achieved by filling the tail of the horse with lead. In this way, Gras had already accomplished what famous sculptors such as Fernkorn, Tacca and Clodt would achieve decades later. The reason that this statue does not have the fame it deserves may be the fact that it lacks the more monumental size of those that would follow. At the time of writing this book, the statue is being restored.
Creating an equestrian statue with a rearing horse was the big challenge for sculptors in the early days of creating these works. The honour of being the first one to do so usually goes to Pietro Tacca, with his statue of Philip IV in Madrid, in 1640 an unprecedented technical feat of bronze casting on this scale. A copy of a painting by Rubens or Velazquez of Philip on a rearing horse was sent to Florence to act as a model. A solution had to be found to keep the statue upright. This was achieved by positioning the centre of gravity as far back as possible. The statue was constructed in two distinct sections; the rear of the horse is solid bronze with the majority of the weight, while the front is hollow. Galileo Galilei determined the precise weights and forces to ensure that it would stand forever. The original calculations and hand-drawn plans penned by Galileo still exist. But however clever and daring the statue of Philip IV may have been, it has to be stated that the statue rests on three points, the two hind legs and the tail of the horse (see Section 2.2.3).
All the equestrian statues with rearing horses created in the following two centuries used this ‘three-point solution’, which makes the achievement of Caspar Gras even more remarkable. The statues of Friedrich August I in Dresden, Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg, Louis XIV in Paris, Wellington in Edinburgh and William the Conqueror in Falaise, all rest on three points.
Creating a monumental-size equestrian statue of a rearing horse, without using its tail or something else as a support, remained a challenge. Clark Mills was one of the first sculptors to do so. He created the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, finalized in 1852 and unveiled in Washington in January 1853. It could be said that the Jackson statue lacks the size necessary to give it impressiveness, but his achievement was admirable for many reasons. Not only is the prancing horse admirably represented, but it should also be noted that Mills was a wholly self-taught artist, who had never seen an equestrian statue up to the time that he executed this work. The conception and modelling were solely his own work and he performed entirely the difficult task of casting it in bronze. Therefore, all the ingenious methods required were of his own invention and construction.
The first statue in Europe of a monumental rearing horse with only the rear hooves as support points was that of Nicholas I by Peter Clodt von Jürgensberg, unveiled in Saint Petersburg in July 1859. This six-metre statue was considered a technical wonder of its time, which saved the statue during the October Revolution in 1917, when the majority of monuments to emperors were dismantled. Culture experts managed to defend the Nicholas I statue as an example of difficult engineering design. Thus this work survived the Soviet period virtually intact.
The equestrian statue of Archduke Karl von Österreich-Teschen by Anton Dominik Fernkorn was to have been unveiled a few months before the dedication of the Nicholas I statue: in Vienna in May 1859, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Aspern-Essling. However, due to a war in Italy, this was postponed to May 1860. The statue of William the Conqueror in Falaise, France, was most probably the inspiration for this monument, but in contrast with the Falaise statue, the one in Vienna is balanced purely on the horse’s hind legs. Fernkorn skilfully executed in this work the difficult task of creating a monumentally sized equestrian statue with the horse and rider successfully balanced on the horse’s hind legs. It was quite an achievement that a statue weighing more than ten tons stands on only two spots, each no larger than a hand. It is said that the stress caused by the question of whether the statue would remain standing or not, was the main cause for the stroke and later the mental illness suffered by Fernkorn
In this context, the comparison of the two equestrian statues that Louis Joseph Daumas created of José de San Martin is also interesting. The first one, erected in Santiago de Chile in 1859 and thus the first equestrian statue in South America, shows San Martin on a rearing horse with a banner in his outstretched right hand. Three years later, Daumas did not include the banner in his Buenos Aires statue. San Martin now only points forward. By doing this, he changed the centre of gravity in such a way that the tail of the horse was no longer needed as a support point, as was the case with the Santiago statue, thereby giving the sculpture more dynamism.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, another three equestrian statues would be created with rearing horses balancing only on their hind legs: Ranodip Singh in Kathmandu (1884) by an unknown sculptor, Antoine de Lasalle in Lunéville (1893) by Charles Cordier, and Jeanne d’Arc in Montebourg en Bretagne (1899) by Mathurin Moreau.Impressive twentieth-century equestrian statues in the same category are the statue of Philip H. Sheridan in Somerset, Ohio (1905), by Carl Heber, a beautifully restored statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in La Spezia (1913) by Antonio Garella, and Antonio Maceo in Havana (1916) by Domenico Boni.
The solutions to keep a rearing or jumping horse upright could be very diverse. Man Fighting a Lion is a really beautiful equestrian sculpture by Albert Wolff in Berlin (1843), where the attacked lion, reaching up and striking the horse with its paws, forms the support for the rearing horse. The same applies to the sculpture by August Kiss, also in Berlin, where the Mounted Amazon (1837) is being attacked by a panther (see Section 2.7.4).
Another popular solution to keep a rearing horse upright was to use a vanquished enemy as the support. Some examples of this are Christian Ernst von Brandenburg in Bayreuth by Elias Rántz and the spectacular statue in Chinon of Jeanne d’Arc by Jules Roulleau.The galloping horse of Vercingétorix by Bartholdi in Clermont Ferrand is supported by a combination of a beaten Roman soldier and a bush
The (lead) statue of Christian V in Copenhagen (1688) by Abraham César Lamoureux could only be prevented from collapsing by adding a man crouching underneath the hoof of the trotting horse, personifying envy. This provides support for the weakest point of the statue, the horse’s barrel.
The ‘bucking bronco’ is a category of its own that should not go unrecorded. The equestrian statue by Edd Hayes of the rodeo champion, Casey Tibbs, in Colorado Springs, shows the champion in rodeo style. The horse stands on its forelegs with its hind legs high in the air. The bucking bronco sculpture Attitude Adjustment, in Joseph, Oregon (2005), by Austin Barton even stands on one hind leg.
1.7.2 Horses with a name and fame
In the UK and the US, the horse shown in the statue had to be recognisable in a number of cases.
The horses in the American Civil War heroes statues are often ‘true to nature’ reproductions of these animals, which were known by their name: Little Sorel of General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Traveller of General Lee, Rienzi of General Sheridan and Highfly of General Stuart to name but a few.
Examples of well-known horses in the UK are Copenhagen, the famous charger of Wellington, Nimrod, the horse of Prince Albert, and Colonel, the horse of Roberts of Kandahar, a pure Arab stallion, born and bred in the desert and purchased after much haggling in Bombay.
The horse could be so well sculpted that it was paid particular attention. The horse by the sculptor J. H. Foley, created for the statue of Viscount Hardinge and later used again for the statue of Viscount Hugh Gough, attracted a great deal of attention when first exhibited in 1859. The Art Journal commented at the time: ‘Arab horse dealers, with whom the love of the horse is a passion, and knowledge of their points of excellence a universal acquirement, are daily to be seen gazing at it’.
There are a number of equestrian sculptures of famous horses. In the US, The Old Trooper, in Fort Riley, marks the final resting place of Chief, the last cavalry horse to be listed on army rolls (died in 1968), the quarter stallion Drag and Fly, a successful cow horse in Redmond, Swaps, a thoroughbred racehorse in Inglewood and the famous racehorse, Seabiscuit, in San Francisco.
In India, the horse of Pratap Singh, which saved its master from the battlefield before dying itself, has its own statue (see Section 2.14.4).
1.7.3 Gender of the horses
By far the majority of the portrayed horses are steeds. Only 9 per cent of the almost 600 equestrian statues where I recorded the gender were a mare or a gelding.
Some amusing stories about the gender of the horse are the following.
Despite the fact that the confederate general John Hunt Morgan’s horse, Black Bess, was a mare, the sculptor Pompeo Coppini thought a stallion was more appropriate. Coppini said, ‘No hero should bestride a mare’, and that was it. Coppini added the necessary testicles to the statue in Lexington, Kentucky. Undergraduates from the nearby university frequently paint the testicles of the horse in the school colours and an anonymous author wrote the Ballad of Black Bess, which ends with: So darkness comes to Bluegrass men — Like darkness o’er them falls —For well we know gentlemen should show –Respect for a lady’s balls
I have already mentioned the statue of W. Scott in Washington. The horse portrayed had to be changed into a steed, because the surviving family thought it unseemly that their famous ancestor was shown mounted on a mare, which in fact would have reflected the reality (see Section 2.11.7).