''Jeune garçon au cheval'' (English: ''Boy Leading a Horse'') is an

oil on canvas Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest o ...

painting by

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

. The painting is housed in the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York. It was painted in Picasso's Rose Period from 1905 to 1906, when he was still a struggling artist living in Paris. The painting is a study for a much larger composition that Picasso never completed.

Background

When Picasso created ''Boy Leading a Horse'', he was an impoverished bohemian artist who was living in Rue Ravignan in the

Montmartre Montmartre ( , ) is a large hill in Paris's northern 18th arrondissement. It is high and gives its name to the surrounding district, part of the Right Bank. The historic district established by the City of Paris in 1995 is bordered by Rue Ca ...

area of Paris. Alongside his fellow artists, he lived in a dilapidated building known as

Le Bateau-Lavoir The Bateau-Lavoir ("Washhouse Boat") is the nickname of a building in the Montmartre district of the 18th arrondissement of Paris that is famous in art history as the residence and meeting place for a group of outstanding early 20th-century artist ...

. Picasso had begun a more positive period of his life, which is now known as his Rose Period, which is distinct from his earlier, more pessimistic Blue Period.

Description

''Boy Leading a Horse'' depicts a nude, unmounted figure leading a horse. The horse has no reins, so the boy’s clenched fist is used to instruct the horse to move forward. Picasso created this work in subdued shades of brown and grey and with very few details. Picasso had planned to create a grand composition on a very large scale, which would have featured the boy from this painting leading the horse by its bridle alongside several mounted riders located around a watering place. Several studies for the complete composition exist which depict other figures that were intended for the composition, in addition to a gouache, a watercolour, a drawing and a drypoint. Several drawings also show various stages in the development of the scene in this painting. The large composition, titled ''The Watering Place'', had been inspired by the work of the French Neoclassical artist Ingres, whose works had been displayed at the

Salon d'Automne The Salon d'Automne (; en, Autumn Salon), or Société du Salon d'automne, is an art exhibition held annually in Paris, France. Since 2011, it is held on the Champs-Élysées, between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, in mid-October. The f ...

in 1905. However, Picasso eventually abandoned the composition, leaving ''Boy Leading a Horse'' as the remaining work. A preparatory sketch of the final composition can be viewed at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, titled ''The Watering Place'', which shows how the work would have appeared when finished. The sketch illustrates several nude adolescents who are washing and watering their horses against a mountainous landscape.

Influences

In his early years as an artist, Picasso was greatly inspired by the work of El Greco, particularly in terms of the colours that he used and the depiction of his figures. El Greco’s ''Saint Martin Sharing his Coat with a Poor Man'' (1597-1599), which also includes a depiction of a horse and a servant, is very different to ''Boy Leading a Horse'' yet possesses similar elements. File:Saint Martin and the Beggar (c1597-1600) by El Greco - Chicago.jpg, El Greco, '' Saint Martin and the Beggar'', c. 1597-1600, Art Institute of Chicago File:Le Grand Baigneur, par Paul Cézanne, Yorck.jpg,

Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically d ...

, ''Bather,'' 1885-1887,

, formerly collection Lillie P. Bliss

Provenance

The painting was first owned by the influential art dealer Ambroise Vollard. It was then acquired by the art collectors

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

and

Leo Stein Leo Stein (May 11, 1872 – July 29, 1947) was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny City (now in Pittsburgh), the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Education ...

, around 1907 to 1913. Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy acquired it in 1934 or 1935. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy sold the work before his death to the Jewish art gallery of Justin Thannhauser. Thannhauser fled Germany and spent most of the war living in Switzerland. He then sold the painting to former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art William S. Paley in 1936. Paley gifted the work to the

in 1964.

Lawsuit

Julius Schoeps, Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam, as speaker for the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family, sued the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 for the painting.

Jed S. Rakoff Jed Saul Rakoff (born August 1, 1943) is a Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Education Rakoff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 1, 1943. He grew up in ...

ruled that Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had been forced to sell the painting by the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

. The dispute was settled out of court in February 2009, with the museum retaining the work.

In other media

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...

's 1962 novel ''

Pale Fire ''Pale Fire'' is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic co ...

'', Professor Kinbote says he placed in his lodging-house "the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boy Leading A Horse Paintings by Pablo Picasso 1905 paintings 1906 paintings Paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) Horses in art Nude art Paintings of children Paintings of Montmartre