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Léon Cogniet; printmaker; 1822; France
Overview
(Jean-Louis André) Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) was an influential French painter and lithographer, best-known for the vast and dramatic, politically-charged The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19; Paris, Louvre) and other paintings, often relating to the Napoleonic Wars. Although he died aged just 32, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement. He accompanied The Raft to its exhibition in London in 1820, where he witnessed urban poverty, made drawings of his impressions, and published lithographs based on these observations which were free of sentimentality. He also responded to the long English love affair with the horse, one that he shared and which is central to this print.
The heroic nobility of the horse in service to humankind was a favorite theme in Géricault's paintings and drawings, and the primary subject of his lithographs. Invented in Bavaria in 1796, lithography was still a new medium to French printmakers when Géricault enthusiastically took up the process. Following the commercial success of his English Series lithographs in 1821, his Parisian publishers convinced him to issue a series of lithographs depicting horses engaged in a variety of occupations. Géricault provided watercolor copies of the six plates depicting horses from his English Series, as well as six additional composition studies, to serve as models; Léon Cogniet rendered them as lithographs for the album Studies of Horses, published by the Gihaut Brothers in 1822. This print, known as The English Blacksmith, is from this album.
It shows a genre scene with just a hint of menace and potential turbulence, so central to Géricault's vision and temperament. In a forge there are three horses, one barely visible, in light rugs, tethered to a wall-ring. One of the horses (wearing a neck and head covering) attempts to bite its neighbour but is fended off with tongs by the blacksmith.
See:
Princeton University Art Museum, 'Le marechal Flamande (The Flemish Ferrier)', http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/9446
Wikipedia, 'Théodore Géricault', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_G%C3%A9ricault
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2018