Farewell to the Horse: the final century of our relationship - review

“In the late 19th century horses start disappearing from paintings.” In this absorbing treatise, Raulff, a prominent German intellectual and former literary editor, dissects the sudden demise of man’s 6,000-year partnership with the horse, that once omnipresent vector of speed, of power, of metaphor.

This award-winning history is in a sense a collection of (sometimes astonishingly) learned meditations touching on anthropology, anatomy, art criticism, physics, philosophy, theology, racing, war, film and literature. Along the way we meet Jewish cowboys, John (and Henry) Ford, Lucian Freud, Rubens, Veronese, Degas, Nietzsche, Hegel, YouTube, Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt and Tolstoy - to name a tiny few. Raulff’s prose - or more precisely Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp’s translation - is both lyrical and lucid, and all is gorgeously illustrated with colour plates, sketches and telling photos.

Raulff is particularly strong at examining our relationship to the horse through works of art. For example, during our anatomy class, we contemplate a figure of a dissected animal from 1772 which suggests Cubism had arrived 140 years early. A remarkable work.