Horses in Art: Prehistoric Cave Artists Got It Right!

Equine art from the eighteenth century frequently portrayed galloping horses in a stretched-out and suspended frame, with both forelegs extended in front of the horse and both hind legs trailing behind. Many hunting, racing, and driving prints favored this dynamic posture when they wanted to show horses swiftly covering the ground.

It wasn’t until 1878, when photographer Eadweard Muybridge took a series of pictures of a galloping horse, that the fallacy of this extended posture was revealed. The photos proved that horses did indeed have a period of suspension as part of each galloping stride, but they also showed that the sequence of footfalls never included a time when the forelegs and hind legs were in the position that artists liked to portray.

A three-beat canter stride begins as one hind leg swings forward, followed by motion of the other hind leg and the diagonal foreleg moving together. Movement of the remaining foreleg is followed by a moment of suspension, completing one stride. At the gallop, the movement is similar but the second element of the canter stride is broken into two parts when the hind leg moves slightly before the diagonal foreleg swings forward. This sequence turns the gallop into a four-beat gait.

Muybridge also photographed trotting horses to dispel the theory that at this gait, the horse always had at least one foot on the ground. In trotting or pacing, horses move either diagonal pairs or same-side pairs of legs at the same time, respectively, resulting in a two-beat gait. As in the canter and gallop, the trotting or pacing horse is briefly suspended with no ground contact if it is moving energetically.

There are some equine gaits in which the horse always has at least one hoof, and usually more than one, contacting the ground. The walk, running walk, amble, rack, foxtrot, and other gaits lack a moment of suspension and are thus smoother for the rider than the trot, canter, or gallop.

Knowing that artists had frequently misrepresented equine movement in their paintings, Gábor Horváth, a biological physicist at Eötvös University in Hungary, recently studied 39 prehistoric cave paintings of horses and other animals to see how accurate these ancient depictions were. In these early works of art that showed animals in motion, the sequence of leg movement was portrayed correctly more than half the time, a better record than for many artists in later years.