The Horses of Achilles
Jan Boeckhorst·1640
Historical Context
Jan Boeckhorst's The Horses of Achilles (c. 1640), at the National Gallery in London, takes its subject from one of the most moving episodes in the Iliad: the divine horses Xanthus and Balius, immortal creatures given by the gods to Achilles, who weep at the death of Patroclus and are then rebuked by Hera for their grief, since they must bear their immortal natures through mortal suffering. The subject is unusual in placing horses — rather than human figures — at the emotional centre of a mythological scene, creating an opportunity to combine epic Homeric narrative with the equestrian painting genre at which Flemish artists excelled. Boeckhorst, with his links to the Snyders tradition of animal painting in Antwerp, was well positioned to treat this subject with genuine conviction. The National Gallery's acquisition demonstrates the work's sustained art-historical interest as an example of the Flemish Baroque treatment of Homeric subjects.
Technical Analysis
A composition centred on horses demands the anatomy, posture, and emotional expression of the animals be as carefully described as human figures in figural painting. Boeckhorst must convey the horses' grief through posture — lowered heads, still stance, perhaps tears — without anthropomorphising them into the absurd. The epic landscape setting of the Trojan plain provides spatial scale appropriate to the Homeric source. The horses' divine immortality is paradoxically expressed through their mortal grief.
Look Closer
- ◆The horses' postures of grief — bowed heads, still stance, absence of the usual equine animation — communicate emotion through body language without requiring human facial expressions
- ◆The scale of the horses relative to the pictorial field reflects the Flemish equestrian tradition in which horses occupy the compositional role usually reserved for heroic human figures
- ◆The Trojan War landscape setting provides epic scope — distant city, military encampment, open plain — that contextualises this intimate moment of animal mourning within the broader Homeric narrative
- ◆Boeckhorst's handling of the horses' coats — the sheen of divine creatures whose beauty is only heightened by their grief — draws on the same material attention to animal surfaces found in Snyders's hunting scenes
