Raymond Duchamp-Villon
French, 1876­1918
Horse
1955­57 version of a 1914 work
Bronze (from an edition of seven)
99.7 x 60.9 x 91.4 cm
Gift of Margaret Fisher in memory of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter L. Fisher, 1957.165

Is this a portrait of a horse or a train? You can clearly see a horse’s hoof in this sculpture, but the leg turns into a gear shaft. The machine that replaced the horse is the engine of a train! We still call the power of an engine its “horsepower.”

Does the sculpture seem more machine than horse? Duchamp-Villon lived in France in the early 1900s, as life was being radically changed by the machine, and artists were beginning to look at the machine as a subject.