Hoofd van een opgetuigd paard, naar links 1775 - 1833

Jean Bernard created this drawing of a horse’s head at an unknown date, using pen and brown ink. It is part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Though undated, the drawing likely dates from the late 18th or early 19th century, a time when the Dutch Republic had been overthrown by revolutionaries, replaced by the Batavian Republic, a client state of France. Horses remained vital to military and agricultural life, and so to the political and economic order. Bernard seems to have been interested in the musculature of the horse’s head, but also in the tack that surrounds it. Equestrian equipment, like weapons and clothing, operated as a marker of social class. Manuals of horsemanship and military science, preserved in national libraries, may give us additional information about the symbolic meaning of such objects. Historians use such resources to better understand the place of images such as this in the culture of their time.