Horse and Knight in Glory — Print & Oil Painting

The colour is the shock. A knight on horseback is not usually painted in turquoise, magenta, lilac and hot gold, but that is the whole fabric of this picture: broken slabs of pigment laid side by side with almost no modelling, so the background reads less as a landscape than as weather made out of paint.

Out of it the horse emerges, dark, mid-stride, forelegs thrown forward, and its head is the one passage on the canvas that has genuinely been drawn. Ears, cheekbone, the line of the bridle, an open mouth against the bit. Everything else can afford to be loose because that head is exact.

The rider is barely a rider. A helm, a shoulder, a raised arm and a blade running up out of the frame, assembled from the same knife strokes as the sky, with a red note at the chest that could be a surcoat or could be nothing at all. He is held together by the horse rather than the other way round.

The lower right corner gives up on representation entirely, and turquoise, crimson and cream break apart into pure marks. At a distance the eye assembles a charge. Up close there is only material. Kept in our Knight & Crusade collection, where the closest thing to it in temperament is the galloping horsemen in gold and green, painted with the same knife and the same disregard for outlines.