Horses, art, and that which we cannot know
A stallion rears backwards — as if in fright or surprise — in Room 34 of London’s National Gallery. He is wary of us, the hair on his mane ruffled. We are amidst a curious crowd gathered to gape at this Arabian stud with a disappointing race career.
Whistlejacket was painted by George Stubbs in 1762 as the Enlightenment eddied and frothed. Primarily, it is a realist piece, Stubbs striving for the closest approximation of reality that he could muster; a living, breathing horse. But it is also has elements of the abstractly modern, particularly the background of strikingly monochromatic beige.
Whistlejacket is one of the finest equine depictions in the history of art since rocks were painted by hunter gatherers in the caves of Lascaux fifteen thousand years ago. These prehistoric paintings were deliberately abstract and otherworldly, but no artists through antiquity and the Middle Ages had succeeded in really getting any closer to nature. Until Stubbs.
His masterpiece did not ride in by chance. Instead, it was a culmination of years of immersion and study. Stubbs was a maverick, a self-taught man who shunned the rigid hierarchy of genres imposed by the art establishment of the time (animal drawings second only to still life in the lowest rankings of prestige).
He was born in Liverpool in 1724, and as an adolescent rejected following his father’s career as a leatherworker, instead taking up draughtsmanship and painting. In young adulthood, Stubbs became apprenticed to physicians and surgeons at York hospital, developing his anatomical knowledge through participation in dissections.
Stubbs was an empiricist, fostering a practical understanding of the body by plunging into wet and stinking flesh and entrails. His first set of medical illustrations were for a textbook on midwifery: the beautifully intricate drawings of foetuses in utero could only have been made through close examination of prosected organs from women who died in pregnancy. Motifs of the savagely indifferent physicality of nature recur through some of Stubbs’ later paintings, particularly in his phantasies of lions gorging on horse flesh.
Stubbs must have understood that depiction begins with understanding, and understanding requires experience. After York, he relocated to a farmhouse in rural Lincolnshire where there was, evidently, a ready supply of horse cadavers. He slung pegs and pulleys over the beams of his barn to hoist up the horses. Here they would hang for up to eleven weeks, slowly putrefying as Stubbs methodically dissected. First the skin. Then the muscles. Then he stopped. He dilated the venous system with wax and watched how it coursed through the corpses.
Stubbs wanted to represent nature as best he could — aiming towards verisimilitude-, and his methods were characteristic of his time: meticulous studies of beings-as-object, prised from their surroundings and subjected to the scientific glare. Before Stubbs began painting, animals depicted across the history of art were invariably stiff and wooden; often they were anatomically ludicrous.
Stubbs knew that to remedy this he had to see for himself what the horse was like, from within as well as without: he had to not just look but know what it took to make a horse. His meticulous observations deepened his ability to understand nature, and his art pushed on the boundaries of what paintings could be.
But boundaries there were. Although Whistlejacket is one of the finest and most realistic horses ever painted, some of Stubbs’ other works have an uncanny, not-quite-of-this-world quality. Several of his painting (and indeed all other artists who tried with him) demonstrate the struggle with depicting horses at a gallop.
This was not their fault. The received wisdom at the time — the agreed reality — was that horses ran like a dog or rabbit, extending all legs in a flying leap. The human visual system is not acute and precise enough to see otherwise. And so Stubbs painted. He lived and died too early for this perceptual blind spot to be filled. But only just.
A century after the publication of Stubbs’ first anatomical drawings, Edward James Muybridge, the son of a coal merchant, moved to the United States to seek his fortune. For a decade he scraped a living as a merchant selling books and the occasional photographic landscape. His life was ever eventful, but we shall join him on a hot evening in July 1860 as he raced towards the Texas border in the back of a stagecoach. As night turned, the horses veered off the road, throwing Muybridge from the cabin and headfirst onto a rock.
He emerged from a coma to find himself in an Arkansas hospital with nine days of peri-traumatic amnesia. He’d suffered a brain injury, and was wracked with double-vision, loss of smell, and confusion. After a period of convalescence in New York City, he returned to his mother in England to recuperate.
Some have postulated that Muybridge’s personality was irrevocably altered by the accident, which twisted him into a mercurial and impulsive genius. But as much of this evidence comes from friends testifying his innocence by insanity at a later trial for the murder of a romantic rival, it is difficult to take these attestations without a pinch of salt.
As the legend then goes, Muybridge was encouraged to take up photography by his treating doctor. Thus Muybridge the traveling salesman morphed into Helios the photographic frontiersman, capturing the contradictions of the American West from his horse-and-cart studio.
On his photographic plates he apprehended a country in flux: from panoramas of the bustling San Francisco cityscape to portraits of indigenous Americans whose lives were being trampled by marauding expansion. His prints of Yosemite, then an unprotected wilderness, captivated the public’s imagination and contributed to the weight of opinion which led to its inauguration as the first national park.
In 1872, now known as a photographer, Muybridge was approached by the governor of California to produce a portfolio of his racehorse collection. The governor was particularly keen for Muybridge to capture his horses in motion, in order to settle a bet with a friend on whether their galloping legs all left the ground simultaneously.
Muybridge took on the lucrative assignment, but his initial attempts were fuzzy and useless. Over the following few years, he worked on bettering the shutter speed and exposure time of his films. He began to build multi-camera devices which could collect multiple images over a short duration; thus dawned the age of chronophotography. To capture movement, Muybridge developed an ingenious mechanism: individual tripwires would snap open lenses on multiple cameras set at regular intervals as an object raced past.
Finally, he tried again. His contraption worked, and Muybridge became a minor celebrity. His findings, if not seismic, were momentous. His series of horses for the first time provided objective evidence of equine motion at high speed. Horses did not gallop like oversized hares, but instead moved in a more rhythmic motion, with all four legs leaving the ground only when they were directly underneath the body. His studies transcended the boundary between art and science and showed how technology could overcome the limits of human perception. He also, inadvertently, changed the history of art.
Muybridge travelled widely, showing off his motion pictures with a device called a zoopraxiscope, which gave the impression of seamless movement. Edgar Degas, the Impressionist painter perhaps most preoccupied with fluidity and dynamism, attended a lecture given by Muybridge in Paris. His drawings of horses, some derived directly from Muybridge’s published photographs, were amongst the first to depict a true gallop. Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, painted over a century before, had finally been supplanted.
Muybridge became obsessed with suspending motion, and began building material for his magnum opus stuffed full of chronophotographs. In 1884, deep in his fervency, Muybridge met the neurologist Dr Francis Dercum. The latter had taken a keen interest in Muybridge’s work and was curious to see how it could be applied to the study of his patients. Like Stubbs, he believed that meticulous study of the natural world — in his case human beings — could deepen understanding of animal biology.
In 1887, Dercum and Muybridge published the first photographs of neurological gaits. Roughly contemporaneous with the Salpetriere’s famous Iconographie of neuropsychiatric patients, Muybridge and Dercum’s work helped usher in a new era of medical photography.
Dercum was a polymath whose interests ballooned to encompass psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy. He was also a believer in progress. Towards the end of his life, he correctly precited a future of virtual reality devices, ubiquitous television, and air travel for the masses. He argued that technological innovation was a means to help disclose the mysteries of nature through overcoming the limits to our knowledge imposed by our imperfect sensory organs. He felt as if he were at the dawn of a marvellous future (1).
In 1925 Dercum published his book The Physiology of Mind, in which he presented his ideas on the nature and cause of consciousness. He argued that reality-as-perceived is wholly dependent on the human mind, and that a true and objective perception of an external world is impossible. Nevertheless, he remained firm that an external world did exist independently of human experience, and cautioned against those who would fall into the abyss of mysticism (2). In these thoughts — the distinctions between phenomena and noumena — Dercum could be described as a follower of Immanuel Kant.
Dercum developed his ideas that human perception is reliant on sense organs which serve to receive, convert, and transmit ‘impacts’ from the environment. Despite the myriad forms of impacts in the world (everything from electromagnetic waves to chemical vibrations to physical collisions), each sense organ only has one form of output: the eyes can only transmit light and the ears only sound. The range of transmissions also has limits: the eyes only transmit certain wavelengths and luminosities, the ears only certain frequencies and volumes. Our understanding and experience of the world is thus inferential and limited, he argued (3).
In November 1929, Dercum delivered an address to the American Philosophical Association, On the Nature of Thought and its Limitation. Dercum, the great believer in progress, spoke to delegates of how humans are only conscious of the changes in ‘the protoplasm of our own substance’, which corresponds only imperfectly to the outside world.
Our sense organs, Dercum argued, also limit our capacity to think: there is no thought, not matter how abstract, which is not bounded in form by the senses. We can only know a horse indirectly, and we can never depict one truly.
We have a mind’s eye and can conjure sounds. We can imagine tomorrow or standing on another continent. But we cannot think in ultraviolet light, electrical impulses, or magnetic fields because we do not have the ability to sense these things. We cannot even begin to think in any of the other mysterious dimensions of physical reality which exist outside of us.
A few lifetimes ago, we could not even know how a horse ran. Anything which cannot be captured by our senses, or the capacity of our technical instruments, is beyond our grasp.
In other words, we cannot comprehend anything which does not correspond to that which we are able to perceive. No matter the progress we make towards a better approximation of the truth, some things will remain unknowable. We can get closer and closer to a perfect depiction of a horse through empirical observation, as did Stubbs. And we can get even closer with the help of technology, as did Muybridge. But we will never quite get there.
We remain chained in our caves of Lascaux, painting wild horses which are barely visible through narrow chinks in the cavern. But we strive to paint the best horses we can.
This essay was written in 2022.
References
1. Dercum DR. FX. Modern Science Disclosing the Mysteries of Nature. Curr Hist 1929;31(2):300–5.
2. Dercum FX. On the Nature of Thought and Its Limitation. Proc Am Philos Soc 1929;68(4):275–302.
3. Sullivan HS. The Physiology of Mind. An Interpretation Based on Biological, Morphological, Physical and Chemical Considerations. By Francis X. Dercum, MD, Ph. D., Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. Reset.(Philadelp. Am J Psychiatry 1927;83(3):609–11.