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# The Most Famous Horse Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/most-famous-horse-paintings/
- Published: 2026-05-22T11:33:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T21:58:49.000Z
- Description: Stubbs, Bonheur, Géricault, Degas, Marc — eight paintings that turned the horse into one of the great subjects of Western art.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

**The most famous horse painting is George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket of about 1762, a life-size rearing chestnut on bare canvas in London’s National Gallery. Its closest rival is Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair of 1852–55, a sixteen-foot stampede of Percherons in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the picture that made her the most celebrated woman artist of the century.**

## [The Horse Fair — Rosa Bonheur, 1852–55](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/11-the-horse-fair-rosa-bonheur.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Horse Fair — Rosa Bonheur, 1852–55 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/11-the-horse-fair-rosa-bonheur-7.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/11-the-horse-fair-rosa-bonheur.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Horse Fair — Rosa Bonheur, 1852–55 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Eight feet high and more than sixteen feet wide, this is one of the largest pictures of horses ever attempted. Bonheur spent about eighteen months sketching at the Paris horse market twice a week, wearing men’s clothes for which she held a police permit, and the result is a broadside of Percheron draft horses being paraded, hauled and half-controlled by their handlers.

It was the hit of the 1853 Salon and made her internationally famous; she was later awarded the Legion of Honour, and went on to become the most decorated woman artist of her century. Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the canvas and gave it to [the Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/11-the-horse-fair-rosa-bonheur.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) in 1887.

## [A Lion Attacking a Horse — George Stubbs](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-a-lion-attacking-a-horse-george-stubbs.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![A Lion Attacking a Horse — George Stubbs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/10-a-lion-attacking-a-horse-george-stubbs-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-a-lion-attacking-a-horse-george-stubbs.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A Lion Attacking a Horse — George Stubbs

Stubbs (1724–1806) knew more about the horse than any painter before or since. He spent roughly eighteen months in a rented Lincolnshire farmhouse dissecting carcasses suspended on tackle, and published the results as *The Anatomy of the Horse* in 1766\. That knowledge underwrites everything, including [this savage picture](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-a-lion-attacking-a-horse-george-stubbs.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), in which a lion has landed across the back of a bay horse with a pale mane and sunk its claws in while the horse screams and twists away.

He returned to the theme more than a dozen times, probably after seeing an antique marble of the subject in Rome. The other Stubbs everyone knows is *Whistlejacket*, a life-size racehorse rearing against an empty background, painted for the Marquess of Rockingham.

## [Death on a Pale Horse — William Blake, c. 1800](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-death-on-a-pale-horse-william-blake.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Death on a Pale Horse — William Blake, c. 1800](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-death-on-a-pale-horse-william-blake-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-death-on-a-pale-horse-william-blake.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Death on a Pale Horse — William Blake, c. 1800

Blake takes his subject straight from Revelation: “and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” The rider is crowned and bearded with his sword raised, and the pale horse throws its head back with its mouth open — not galloping so much as convulsing. Beneath them writhe scaled, serpentine bodies and a screaming head, the Hell that the verse says followed after, while a naked figure sails across the top of the sheet holding a disc.

It is watercolor and ink rather than oil, made around 1800, in the years when Blake was producing biblical watercolors for his patron Thomas Butts. [Nothing here is observed from life](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-death-on-a-pale-horse-william-blake.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) — this is the horse as apocalypse, and it has shaped the visual idea of the Four Horsemen ever since.

## [The Charging Chasseur — Théodore Géricault, 1812](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-charging-chasseur-theodore-gericault.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Charging Chasseur — Théodore Géricault, 1812 (Musée du Louvre)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-charging-chasseur-theodore-gericault-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-charging-chasseur-theodore-gericault.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Charging Chasseur — Théodore Géricault, 1812 (Musée du Louvre)

Géricault was twenty-one when he sent this to the Salon of 1812, and it won a gold medal. An officer of Napoleon’s mounted chasseurs twists in the saddle with his sabre raised while his dappled gray rears and shies away from the smoke — the horse’s panic, not the rider’s bravado, is the real subject, and the whole diagonal composition tips forward off its hind legs.

The picture arrived in the last months before the retreat from Moscow, which gives its swagger an unintended edge. Géricault rode obsessively and died at thirty-two from injuries sustained in falls; [the painting hangs in the Louvre](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-charging-chasseur-theodore-gericault.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Jockeys in the Rain — Edgar Degas, c. 1883–86](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/jockeys-in-the-rain-edgar-degas.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Jockeys in the Rain — Edgar Degas, c. 1883–86](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/jockeys-in-the-rain-edgar-degas-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/jockeys-in-the-rain-edgar-degas.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Jockeys in the Rain — Edgar Degas, c. 1883–86

Degas painted the racecourse for thirty years, and it is the least sentimental horse subject in art: no winners, no finishing posts, just animals milling about before the start while jockeys in colored silks sit and wait. Here he draws the downpour as diagonal strokes of pastel straight across the horses, so the weather sits on the picture surface rather than behind it.

Degas cared about accuracy. Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 stop-motion photographs proved that the old “flying gallop” — all four legs stretched out at once — never happens, and [Degas quietly corrected his horses afterward](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/jockeys-in-the-rain-edgar-degas.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [A Dash for the Timber — Frederic Remington, 1889](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-dash-for-the-timber-frederic-remington.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![A Dash for the Timber — Frederic Remington, 1889 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-a-dash-for-the-timber-frederic-remington-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-dash-for-the-timber-frederic-remington.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A Dash for the Timber — Frederic Remington, 1889 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)

Eight cowboys come at the viewer flat out, firing over their shoulders at pursuing Apache riders, one man already slumping from the saddle. Remington was twenty-seven, and the canvas — nearly seven feet wide — was the picture that made him. Shown at the National Academy of Design in 1889, it established the galloping horse as the signature of the American West.

It also dates him precisely: the legs are painted in the old stretched-out gallop that photography had just disproved. Remington saw Muybridge’s sequences soon after and rebuilt his horses accordingly. [The painting is at the Amon Carter Museum](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-dash-for-the-timber-frederic-remington.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) in Fort Worth.

## [The White Horse — Paul Gauguin, 1898](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-the-white-horse-paul-gauguin.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The White Horse — Paul Gauguin, 1898 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/10-the-white-horse-paul-gauguin-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-the-white-horse-paul-gauguin.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The White Horse — Paul Gauguin, 1898 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Gauguin painted this in Tahiti in 1898, and the story attached to it is one of the best in nineteenth-century art. A local pharmacist had commissioned a picture and refused to take delivery, on the grounds that the horse was green. He was not wrong: the animal drinking in the foreground is modeled almost entirely in cool greens and violets picked up from the reflected foliage.

The composition — a curved tree slicing across the top, riders receding into a flattened middle distance, no horizon to speak of — owes as much to Japanese prints as to anything Gauguin saw on the island. [It now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/10-the-white-horse-paul-gauguin.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Blue Horse I — Franz Marc, 1911](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-blue-horse-franz-marc.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Blue Horse I — Franz Marc, 1911 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-blue-horse-franz-marc-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-blue-horse-franz-marc.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Blue Horse I — Franz Marc, 1911 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich)

A young horse stands with its head lowered against bands of red, yellow and green hills, its body a single sweep of cobalt and pale blue. Marc had a private color theory — blue for the spiritual and austere, yellow for the gentle and sensuous, red for the brutal and material — so the color is not decoration but description of temperament.

He painted it in 1911, the year he and Kandinsky founded Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. Marc believed animals saw the world more truthfully than people did. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty-six; [the painting is in the Lenbachhaus](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-blue-horse-franz-marc.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## Frequently asked questions

### What is the most famous horse painting?

George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, painted around 1762 and now in the National Gallery in London, is generally the answer: a life-size chestnut racehorse rearing against a completely empty background, with no landscape, rider or groom. The most famous painting of horses in the plural is Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, an eight-by-sixteen-foot canvas of Percherons at the Paris horse market.

### Who is the most famous horse painter?

George Stubbs (1724–1806). He spent about eighteen months dissecting horses in a Lincolnshire farmhouse and published The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766, giving him a command of equine structure no painter has matched. His nearest rivals are Rosa Bonheur in the nineteenth century and, for horses in motion, Edgar Degas and Frederic Remington.

### Why did Rosa Bonheur wear men’s clothing to paint The Horse Fair?

Trousers were practical for eighteen months of sketching in a working horse market, and they drew less attention than a woman in skirts would have done. Wearing them in public required official permission in nineteenth-century Paris, and Bonheur held a police permit to do so. She renewed it for the rest of her life.

### Did artists paint galloping horses incorrectly before photography?

Yes. For centuries painters used the “flying gallop,” with all four legs extended fore and aft at the same moment. Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs of 1878 showed that a galloping horse never adopts that position — when all four feet leave the ground, the legs are gathered underneath. Artists including Degas and Remington revised their horses afterward.

### Where is The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur?

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the painting and presented it to the museum in 1887\. Bonheur also produced a smaller version of the composition, and the subject was widely engraved in the nineteenth century, which is why the image was familiar long before most people could see the original.

### What does the horse symbolize in art?

It shifts with the century. In equestrian portraits the horse signals command and legitimacy; in Blake and the Book of Revelation it carries death; in Géricault and Remington it stands for nerve and danger; in Degas it becomes a study of anatomy and modern leisure. By the time Franz Marc paints one blue, the horse has become a symbol of innocence set against human civilisation.

The horse gave painters something no other subject did: enormous physical power that has to be described accurately or it looks absurd. Every painting above is available as a [canvas](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/canvas+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), [framed](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/framed+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) or [art prints](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and you can browse the full [horse art collection](https://fineartamerica.com/art/horses?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) or the rest of our [famous paintings](https://fineartamerica.com/art/famous+paintings?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).