Farm Horses
Medium
Lithograph in black on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 19.2 × 26.7 cm (7 9/16 × 10 9/16 in.); Sheet: 27.2 × 36 cm (10 3/4 × 14 3/16 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
79485
Art Historical Context
Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault’s *Farm Horses* (1823) captures the quiet power and vitality of working animals in a lithograph printed in black on ivory wove paper. Created late in the artist’s brief career, the print reflects his lifelong fascination with horses as symbols of strength and movement. Géricault, a leading figure of French Romanticism, brought dramatic energy to even this seemingly ordinary subject, using the medium’s fluid lines to suggest both the animals’ mass and their latent energy. Lithography was still a relatively new reproductive technique in the 1820s, prized for ...
About the Artist
Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault · 1791–1824
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) was born into a prosperous bourgeois family in Rouen, France, the son of a lawyer who managed the family tobacco business. After moving to Paris around 1797, his artistic talent emerged early, nurtured in a circle that included his maternal uncle Jean-Baptiste Caruel and art dealer Jean-Louis Laneuville. Géricault began formal training in 1808 under ...