If we have to represent men rowing, the best way is to draw them leaning forward and with outstretched arms, the oars just catching the water.
The degree in which they are reaching forward is the key to the length of the stroke, and, therefore, in great measure, to the velocity of the boat. If they are rowing a race, or spurting, their arms and backs would be almost horizontal; if they are merely paddling, their bodies would be only gently inclined forward. We have no means in painting, drawing, or photography, of indicating the number of strokes per minute, any more than we have of timing the rapidity of a man’s steps when he is walking or running; but we can in both cases indicate clearly the length of the stroke or step, and the length is generally a pretty good index of the rapidity.
Supposing that, with the idea of being original, an artist should choose to represent the moment when the stroke is half rowed through, when the bodies of the crew are comparatively upright, and the arms beginning to bend, can any one suppose that his drawing would have the same spirit as if he had taken the previous moment, when the men were all extended?
From these examples we may deduce the rule, that to represent action of any kind, the figure should be extended to the full limit of the position necessary to produce that action.
Having established this rule, we will now consider how far it is applicable to the action of animals.
We find but little amongst the works of the old Italian masters which can by any stretch of fancy be called a galloping horse.
But few of them attempted horse-painting at all, and those who did make the attempt were content to reproduce with more or less skill the heavy shapeless war-horse of Roman sculpture. These portly animals were represented either at rest or pawing the ground. Sometimes, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s “Fight for the Standard,” they are rearing, kicking, biting, and displaying every form of equine vice; but we very seldom come across a real galloping or even a trotting horse, until the end of the sixteenth century.
Rubens’ horses are often represented galloping, but it must be confessed that they are not getting over the ground very fast. The hind legs are invariably on the ground and the fore legs well bent; just straighten them a little, and you have the prototype of the modern rocking-horse.
This old-fashioned way of representing a horse galloping was blindly adopted by successive generations of artists through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I believe that Carl Vernet (the father of Horace) was the first to innovate. His studies of horses are admirable. Whether walking, trotting, or galloping, their action is always spirited and suggestive. His method has never been improved upon, and probably never will.