It has become something of a convention in the horse world that until the advent of photography people were largely ignorant about how horses moved, and that paintings and engravings of  horses galloping were completely wrong and even, in the words of one author, 'quaint, if not comical'.

I often felt there was something not quite right about this way of thinking.  I have often watched our horses galloping, and have observed that, especially during a sudden burst of acceleration, there are times when they do indeed appear, for a fraction of a second, to move in the manner of the horses depicted above, in an illustration taken from Major Francis Dwyer's famous treatise On Seats and Saddles, Bits and Bitting (1869). It did occur to me that a frame-by-frame analysis of video footage of  horses galloping at such  moments might show whether this was indeed the case, or whether it was an optical illusion (I’m sure someone, somewhere, has carried out such a study, but I haven’t  got round to looking yet). However, there always seemed to be something else claiming my attention, so I never got round to doing anything about making such an analysis.

Then a few years ago a member of the Classical Riding Club, Tony Dampier, made an observation in the club's newsletter which got me thinking again.Tony asked whether any other CR members could explain why, for centuries, horses were depicted in European art as ‘running like so many mice’, in other words, with the front legs extended forwards together, and the hind legs extended backwards together, in a kind of bounding action (mice bound, horses do not). This seemed particularly odd to Tony, since the horses depicted on the frieze of the Parthenon show clearly that the classical Greeks knew perfectly well the correct sequence of footfalls in the canter.

After some thought, I believe I may have the answer (there may, of course, be more than one answer): the European artists were not necessarily wrong!

But how can this be? We all know, don’t we, that horses don’t really move as they are depicted in so much sporting art?

Or do they?

 After much scrabbling around in the information junk room which masquerades as my brain, I remembered reading something which might shed some light on Tony's question. I found it in a book by mathematicians Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky, in which they talk about dynamic processes in which symmetry can either be destroyed or created. One chapter is devoted to a discussion of symmetry in animal gaits, and it was there that I hit the jackpot. One of the illustrations shows a horse galloping: the text describes this as a rotary gallop, where the sequence of footfalls would, for example, be left hind, right hind, right fore, left fore; this is the gallop usually found in big cats such as cheetahs. However, the gallop in the illustration is in fact the one more usually adopted by horses, the transverse gallop, where the sequence would be (for example): left hind, right hind, left fore, right fore. No matter; this blip in the text does not affect the point I am about to make. This is that the illustration shows not one but two periods of suspension in a single gallop stride.

I have reproduced part of the illustration here (with my own comments added), and you can see that the period of suspension at A corresponds pretty closely to the running attitude depicted in so much sporting art, although the latter, of course, tended to be rather stylised. Curiously, he of the contorted name, Eardweard Muybridge (whose pioneering photographs led to a greater understanding of how animals move) predicted that one day someone would observe two periods of suspension in a single stride of the fast gallop of a horse. In fact A. Brazier Howell’s Speed in Animals (University of Chicago Press, 1944) contains an illustration showing a fast gallop which includes two periods of suspension.

 All this inspired me to examine existing video footage of our own horses galloping about in excitement. I did not have to search too far before I found some promising material, and sure enough, running the tape frame-by-frame revealed that at one point my Arab gelding Zareeba, accelerating like a cork from a champagne bottle, actually manages to produce two suspension periods within one stride. Admittedly the suspension lasts only a fraction of a second, and is barely visible to the human eye, but it exists nevertheless, and in roughly the same form as that in the illustration shown above.

 So perhaps the sporting artists knew rather more than we give them credit for! It may be that they, with eyes tuned to observation, actually saw, just fractionally, this extra period of suspension in some rapidly accelerating or galloping horses. They may then have wished to give an impression of speed by incorporating this into their sporting art. If this is the case, then although they were undoubtedly employing artistic licence (and why not?), they were by no means as off-beam as we tend to think!

 As a postscript to all this, I should like to add that masters such as La Guérinière certainly knew the correct sequence of footfalls in the walk, trot, canter and gallop, as well as the fact that the latter two gaits contained at least one period of suspension; this is made clear by La Guérinière’s descriptions in L’École de la Cavalerie. Whether they also knew that there was a period of suspension in the trot is not clear. They would mainly use the collected school trot, in which the degree of suspension would not be readily apparent. We must remember that at that time the trot was not much used outside the manège; for general riding (i.e. for getting from A to B), most people preferred the amble, which was so much more comfortable for the rider. That was why amblers were so much in demand. The trot was simply too uncomfortable a gait for travelling very far! It was not until the rising trot was developed in the eighteenth century (for use by postilions, hence the term ‘posting’ to the trot, still often used in the USA) that the trot became a part of general purpose riding.

 We are often told that ‘the camera cannot lie’, but of course it can, as any half-decent photographer knows. The human eye (or, perhaps more accurately, the brain to which it is attached) is also notoriously unreliable. But, very occasionally, perhaps a perceptive eye does – just for an instant – truly see what is really there.

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