62 THE PROBLEM OF THE GALLOPING HORSE 



so much was made known by the discoveries of that 

 wonderful man Schliemann when he dug up the citadel of 

 Agamemnon) — the figures of animals, horses, deer, bulls 

 (see the beautiful gold cups of Vaphio), dogs, lions, and 

 griffins, in the exact conventional pose of " the flying 

 gallop," are quite abundant ! (See PI. II, figs. 2, 3, and 4.) 

 There was an absolute break in the tradition of art between 

 the early gold-workers of Mykend (1800 to 1000 B.C.) and 

 the Greeks of Homer's time (800 B.C.). Europe never re- 

 ceived it, nor did the Assyrians nor the Egyptians. Thirty 

 centuries and more separate the reappearance in Europe 

 of the flying gallop — through Stubbs — from the only other 

 European examples of it — the Mycenaean. What, then, 

 had become of it, and how did it come to England ? 

 M. Reinach shows, by actual specimens of art-work, that 

 the Mycenaean art tradition, and with it the "flying gallop," 

 passed slowly through Asia Minor noi-th-eastwards to the 

 Trans-caucasus (Koban 500 B.C.), to Northern Persia, and 

 thence by Southern Siberia to the Chinese Empire (PI. Ill, 

 fig. 2) as early as 150 B.C., and that the "flying gallop," so 

 to speak, " flourished " there for centuries, and was trans- 

 mitted by the Chinese artists to the Japanese, in whose 

 drawings it is frequent (PL III, fig. 3). It was at last finally 

 brought back to Europe, and to the extreme west of it, 

 namely, England, by the importation in the eighteenth 

 century into England of large numbers of Japanese works 

 of art. It was a Japanese drawing (M. Reinach infers) 

 which suggested to Stubbs the upturned hinder hoofs and 

 the detachment from the ground of " the flying gallop " 

 which he gave in his portrait of " Baronet," and so estab- 

 lished that pose for a century in modern European art. 

 This is a delightful tracing out of the wanderings of an 

 artistic "convention," and the curious thing is that its 

 chief importance is not that it has to do with the move- 

 ments of the horse, but that it tends (as do other dis- 



