The Metropolitan Museum's Collection of Artworks Depicting Horses

    Rubens created a new art form:very large hunting scenes painted on canvas.
    The few earlier examples were either models for or copies after tapestries, but Rubens's large "hunts" of about 1616 - 21 were made as replacements for that very expensive medium.
    This canvas, originally more symmetrical in design, was trimmed at the top and left side because "none but great Princes have houses fitt to hange it up in."
    Rubens painted the picture with the help of assistants but declared that the wolves were his own work.

George Washington

    James helped his elder brother Charles Willson Peale make replicas of his popular full-length portrait of Washington, commissioned in 1779 by the state of Pennsylvania.
    The bright color and clean outlines of this small version are characteristic of James's style.
    After the Continental forces, assisted by the French, had triumphed over the British at Yorktown in 1781, James Peale sketched the battle site, including here a view of the harbor showing the protruding masts of sunken ships.

Plate (from the "Vues Diverses" service)

    The painting illustrates a combat near the ruined tombs of Baalbek in the mountains of Syria.
    The scene was adapted by Le Bel from a drawing by the peripatetic Louis-Francois Cassas (1756 - 1827), whose travels took him from northern Europe to Istria, Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Egypt.
    Casas spent nearly a month in Baalbek in 1785, and his views were etched and engraved for his "Voyage Pittoresque de la Syrie," published in 1799.
    Our plate comes from a set of "views diverses "and is one of only two in the series to depict a scene outside France.
    The service was begun during the Napoleonic period but was completed in 1816, when it was delivered to Louis XVIII.