In celebration of the 200th anniversary of his early death (1824), this exceptional show brings together for the first time nearly all of the Romantic artist’s studies of the horse in an extraordinary variety of techniques from oil painting to watercolor, ink drawing, pencil studies and superb prints.

We tend to forget how omnipresent the horse was in our environment before the advent of the automobile in the early 20th century. Géricault is the only artist in the history of art to notice this and record the essence of the human relationship with the horse in virtually all of its aspects. Every type of horse figures in the show from calvary horses, racehorses, dray horses, wild horses, even dead horses, viewed from a variety of visual, anatomical and psychological perspectives. A passionate rider himself (he died as a result of injuries sustained in a riding accident), Géricault paints and draws horses with an acute sense of observation that belies an extraordinary sense of respect, empathy and compassion for the animal. His horse studies have a psychological and expressive profundity rarely seen in animal paintings, making the current exhibition a truly revelatory show.