Poney

Poney (1870) at the Musee Gustave Moreau is a relatively unusual subject within Moreau's mythological and Symbolist output — a horse study that belongs to a tradition of animal painting far more common in French art than in his own specific oeuvre. The pony as a subject may have been a private study, a commission, or a decorative exercise rather than a statement of Moreau's symbolic ambitions. The 1870 date places it in the productive period between his early Salon works and his mature Symbolist phase. Animal studies of this kind sometimes functioned as relaxations from the intense intellectual labor of his symbolic compositions, or as exercises in observation that informed the horses appearing in mythological works such as the Suitors or Diomedes.

A horse study from Moreau shows the same careful attention to animal anatomy that informed his mythological compositions. The pony's coat color and musculature would be observed with the naturalistic precision he applied to all his subjects, even outside his signature symbolic mode.