Important Notice

The horse was a lifetime muse for M F Husain. His fascination with the animal can be traced back to his early childhood in Indore, when his beloved grandfather would take him to the workshop of the local farrier, Acchan Mian, who was a close friend. There he would often encounter tonga horses and those belonging to the cavalry of the Holkar king and was taken in by their power, elegance, and vitality. The grandeur of the Duldul,... The horse was a lifetime muse for M F Husain. His fascination with the animal can be traced back to his early childhood in Indore, when his beloved grandfather would take him to the workshop of the local farrier, Acchan Mian, who was a close friend. There he would often encounter tonga horses and those belonging to the cavalry of the Holkar king and was taken in by their power, elegance, and vitality. The grandeur of the Duldul, the effigy of Imam Husain’s horse that was carried during Muharram processions, also left an indelible mark on the young boy’s mind. Influenced by these formative experiences, the horse became an integral part of Husain’s artistic oeuvre.

Husain’s sensibilities are an assimilation of diverse sources, including Indian folk and classical traditions, his travels, and the socio-political milieu of the time. This afforded him the freedom to take his subjects out of their traditional contexts and imbue them with a new meaning, as seen in his horses. As he established himself as an artist in Bombay in the 1940s onwards, Husain travelled extensively and encountered various forms of his muse, including the Bankura horse of West Bengal and the horses in the chariot of the Sun God at the Konark temple in Orissa. He was also particularly moved by the images of galloping horses by Chinese painter Xu Beihong, whose works he saw on a 1952 trip to China.

In the present lot, the dynamic form of the Duldul can be observed in Husain’s depiction of the horse as a toy-like figure in a rising posture with its front legs stretched out. Its raised mane, open jaws, and flared nostrils demonstrate the influence of Chinese art traditions on his works. The horse appears to be charging into battle and is placed prominently in the foreground while the rider appears as an indistinct figure in the corner. Husain delineates the animal in planes of colour, rather than lines, and the visual drama of the painting is enhanced by its red background.

Husain imbued his equine figures with a sense of mythic power and virility, as vehicles for change in the world. “The horses are rampant or galloping; the manes, the fury, the working buttocks, the prancing legs, and the strong neighing heads with dilated nostrils are blocks of colour which are vivid or tactile or are propelled in their significant progression by strokes of the brush or sweeps of the palette knife. The activity depicted is transformed in the activity of paint... When we look at these creatures we must remember that the animal is not the subject of Husain’s painting; it is the daemonic principle that he depicts, and to him it is neither good nor bad... the horses... have become symbols of power and pursuit, or of mysterious encounters.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc, 1972, p. 20)

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