Description
Landscape with a Horse on the Road – the fence is the only straight line
The lower third of the canvas is taken up by a wide pink road that climbs slowly from the right towards the left. A brown horse grazes beside it with its head down. Immediately behind the horse stands a small figure in a long red garment and a pale head covering. A low wooden fence of upright palings runs across the whole width of the picture. Behind the fence a pale house with a sharp gable and a large thatched roof can be seen. The upper half of the canvas is filled by a dense green crown of leaves, and above it the fronds of a palm come down from the top edge. Yellow-green hills stand at the back. The work is held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow under inventory number Zh-3263; it was painted in 1899.
The fence is the only straight line in the painting
Everything else on this canvas is curved or irregular: the road winds, the crowns spread in uneven clumps, the thatched roof sags, the hills undulate. The one straight and repeating rhythm is the fence, and it is the fence that runs from one edge to the other. Because of it the eye does not slide away into depth but stops, and only then climbs into the trees.
The road is the largest area, and it is not brown
The road takes up more space than anything else on the canvas, more even than the houses. It is painted in pinks and salmon tones, with single green and bluish strokes in the wheel ruts. This is not a colour anyone would have measured on the spot; it is a decision, and it gives the whole lower third a warmth the green above it does not have.
The horse grazes and the road is empty
The title puts the horse on the road; the painting puts it beside the road. The animal stands on the grassy verge with its head to the ground and does not move. The road itself is empty. The scene therefore has no action in it, only a few creatures that have stopped in the same place at the same hour.
The signature and the year
At the lower left a signature with a year is painted onto the canvas. It is laid on in a darker colour than the road beneath it and is easy to miss; once found, it agrees with the year the museum record gives.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the road is the hardest part: it is large and light, but it has to stay alive or it becomes an empty pink area. The same is true of the palings of the fence, which must stay straight without turning rigid. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: a pink road, a horse beside it, a house and a thatched roof behind the fence.
- Technique: oil on canvas, pink below, dense green above.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 40 x 50 cm to 160 x 200 cm; 72 x 90 cm and 87 x 110 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: the fence is the only straight stroke on the whole canvas.
Here the road; the trees are elsewhere on this shelf: Te raau rahi (The Big Tree), I Raro Te Oviri (Under the Pandanus) and Te burao (The Hibiscus Tree). The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 94 x 73 cm.
