PICTURE HORSES 283 



any quality into a horse ; in fact, a very celebrated 

 horse-sculptor told me a real horse is inartistic and unfit 

 for sculpture, that is why he makes his horses a cross 

 between a pig and an elephant ! 



" Landseer, far from making a horse with human 

 eyes, painted the horse's eye very lifelike. 



" Rosa Bonheur painted the Percheron horse very 

 well. It is ridiculous to say she could neither draw nor 

 paint. Her ' Horse Fair ' is the best horse picture 

 ever painted. She did not model the anatomical horse 

 — ^that was by her brother, Isidore Bonheur — a caricature 

 of which is the ' Physical Energy,' by Watts, put up 

 in Kensington Gardens and also on Cecil Rhodes' tomb. 



" Your readers should look at this when they are 

 passing the west end of Kensington Gardens. The 

 sculptor, out of excessive modesty, has left out the 

 main characteristic of a stallion (which the Isidore Bon- 

 heur statue he tried to imitate is), and made it into an 

 impossible thing — 3. ' mare-stallion,' with club feet 

 and a broken back, ridden by a drunken man. 



" Meissonier, far from making 'property horses,' as 

 * Toplight ' says, painted accurate portraits of his troop 

 horses and made them actually walking, trotting or 

 galloping, as the modem instantaneous photographs 

 show ; in fact, he was the only man who did the walk 



