Greek
Provenance
Beaven Collection, Cotswolds, UK, 1960s
Fortnum and Mason, Equus. Three Millennia of the Horse, London, 14 April - 29 June 2003
With Charles Ede Limited, London
With Cahn AG, Basel, 2010
Swiss private collection, Zurich
Literature
Such an appliqué would once have been riveted to a large-scale bronze vessel such as a krater. This is an unusual type with one rider but two horses.
The combination of the naturalistic representation of the horses' bodies with the more stylised facial features on the young man, indicates that this bronze may be dated to the transitional period from Archaic to Classical Greece; between the first and second Persian Wars circa 490 – 480 BC, this was a time of great artistic, cultural and political change in Greece.
For a bronze figure with similar archaic rendering of the rider's face and eyes, cf. M. Comstock & C. Vermeule, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, 1971, p. 42, no. 42. For other slightly earlier Greek statuettes of riders, cf. Comstock & Vermeule op. cit., pp. 34-5, nos. 32-33 and cf. A.S. Walker, Animals in Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection, Mainz, 1996, no. 124, 188; a Laconian example is now in the Getty: C.C. Mattusch, Enduring Bronze: Ancient Art, Modern Views, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014, p. 76, fig. 55.