![]() ![]() As historical actors in these scenes, the horses also solicit the viewers’ gaze and implore them to notice and respond to the lives and suffering shared by human and nonhuman animals alike. The lateral placement of horses’ eyes perfectly positions them to allow for such a range of vision. In a particularly poignant passage in the afterword, Weil also notes the “witnessing” role played by the horses in Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) turbulent canvases:Īnd what was especially telling, and newly apparent to me in these works, was the way Delacroix paints the horse as witness, figured with one eye on the violence of the scene and one on the viewer who is pulled in by his (or her) often terrified look. The instinctual frenzy of Géricault’s unmounted steeds in The Race of the Riderless Horses (1817) and the horses chafing at their bonds in Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1852–55), to name two central examples, evince the subterranean energies of animal vitality and, in Bonheur’s case, the horse’s emotional connection to the rider and to the viewer. Despite this human-dictated artifice, the paintings and prints selected by Weil are one of the best means of glimpsing moments of interspecies intimacy and the otherwise elusive expressions of the animals. The horsemen and horsewomen of nineteenth-century France were indeed preoccupied with appearances: the showmanship of dressage, the class display of a Sunday afternoon carriage ride in the Bois de Boulogne, the masculine feats of military riding techniques. Human and animal engage in subtle, unspoken forms of communication through gaze, touch, and training that Weil (herself a longtime equestrian) posits to be more complicated than a simple matter of physical animal strength submitted to human intellectual will. However, as Weil so astutely observes, the external gloss of this imagery, whether hegemonic or subversive in nature, was always underpinned by the quotidian relations between horse and human. Print culture likewise ranged between the dignity of the amazone and the scandal of Jewish American Adah Menken’s (1835–68) scantily clad horse-riding feats. Bernard, (five versions, 1801–05), but was also destabilized by artists like Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) and Rosa Bonheur (1822–99), who gave their equine figures equal (or greater) priority as compared to their humans. The classical image of the mounted sovereign literally and figuratively governing his subjects from “above” continued to be referenced by equestrian statues and paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Mount St. While the text incorporates a sweeping range of sources and media, from novels and paintings to public health treatises on the salutary benefits of horsemeat for the French working classes, it was the image of the horse-and his/her accompanying rider––that pervaded the popular discourses and imaginaries of animality and humanity. The non-speaking role played by these equine creatures was, the book persuasively argues, a largely unappreciated but central aspect of the century’s material, economic, and social history. The volume deftly explores the complex interdependence between human beings and the omnipresent carthorses, aristocratic purebreds, racing steeds, circus performers, and military mounts. In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil reveals how equine culture reached its apex in France during the nineteenth century, as workhorses flooded overcrowded Parisian streets and the practice of horse riding, once primarily associated with the military and nobility, was taken up by a wider swath of society. Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France.Ĭhicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020.Ģ40 pp.
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