Meme Day Two. A Picture

[erastes]

Day one a song
Day two: (today!): a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

I hummed and ha-ed over this for ages.  Pre-Raphaelite?  Possibly. Something with Icarus? Could be.  Something homoerotic?  You'd think so.

In the end I went for this, because I think it was the first "grown up picture" that I really identified with as quite a young child.  I used to get "Look and Learn" when I was young, a wonderul educational "newspaper" for children, a mix of art, news, science and encyclopaedia.  This was in the magazine, and I removed it and it was on my wall for years and years.

There's something that Landseer captures with animals, and horses in particular, he understands the horse in a way that few artists did (and still do in my opinion) - the musculature is right, the positions are right.  He's probably best know for "Monarch of the Glen" and the lions in Trafalgar square, but this picture is his masterpiece in my opinion. I believe that he dissected corpses of animals in the same that Michelango did with humans; my mother told me that, I think, or I may have read it in Look and Learn. But if he did, it explains how he really understands the way the muscles look under the skin.

My first exposure to this picture was probably around the same time as I first saw Ben Hur when the sheikh there introduces Judah to meet "his children" the four fabulous white arabian horses that Ben-Hur races in Rome. I also had a book called "King of the Wind" by Marguerite Henry (better known for Misty of Chincoteague) which is a fictionalised story of the Godolphin Arabian (mostly based on fact, however unlikely it seems. Within that book I found the Biblical passage: Job 39 in praise of the horse. "As often as the trumpet sounds he says, 'Aha!' And he scents the battle from afar, And the thunder of the captains and the war cry."

I also love the other animals, almost invisible, as the eyes are drawn to the touching, beautiful, almost Nativityish scene of mother and child, all relaxing in very typical doggie and monkey like manner. Landseer, for me, not only captures the image, but the essence of a horse. Perfection.

Comments

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Oh, that' beautiful. This is the kind of picture I think my artist in TW would do... Madonna and foal. And the little one isn't quite sure where to put those long legs. I never saw this one. I'll have to look up Landseer in the library.

I went through the Henry books as a kid, too, and wished I could live somewhere with room enough for a pony.

[ammonite7.livejournal.com]

Me, too. Loved that book and have forever after loved Arabians and how the Arabs often kept them in their tents with them like favored children. I also red all of Walter Farley's books, and my favorite was the "Red Stallion," even over the black. I was always in trouble for drawing horses all over my homework.

The painting is glorious. The artist must have loved animals, especially horses.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adored King of the Wind when I was younger; it made me just obsessed with Arabian horses. And that is a gorgeous painting.

[charliecochrane.livejournal.com]

Look and Learn was magnificent. *nods*