Wild Arabian Horses
Artist
Alfred Dedreux
(French, 1810 - 1860)
Dateca. 1833
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsOverall: 59 x 86 1/4 in. (149.9 x 219.1 cm)
Overall, Frame: 64 x 91 1/2 in. (162.6 x 232.4 cm)
Overall, Frame: 64 x 91 1/2 in. (162.6 x 232.4 cm)
ClassificationsEuropean art
Credit LineGift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Object number71.638
Terms
- Horses
- People
On View
Not on viewLabel TextAlfred Dedreux French (1810-1860) Wild Arabian Horses, ca. 1833 Oil on canvas Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.638 In Dedreux's Wild Arabian Horses, the artist celebrates the fierce energy and untamed beauty of a pair of wide-eyed steeds racing to escape capture by an Arab plainsman. Dedreux was only twenty-four years old when he painted it, and the work is among the most ambitious and imaginative of the artist's early paintings. He showed it that same year, 1834, at the Paris Salon, where his submissions earned him several medals. As a child, Dedreux often visited the Paris studio of the great Romantic painter Théodore Gericault. Gericault's spirited depictions of horses had a formative effect on him, as did the equestrian images of the English painter George Stubbs, whose work Dedreux discovered through Gericault. After 1848 Dedreux largely devoted himself to fashionable, formal portraits of elegant equestrians posing in park-like settings. However, in early works like the Wild Arabian Horses, Dedreux's allegiance to the passionate Romanticism of Gericault and Stubbs is still clear.
