If you wander down one of the corridors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, you will come across a full length portrait of one George Harley Drummond, by Sir Henry Raeburn.
George Harley Drummond was the eldest son of a wealthy member of the British aristocracy, aged 25 at the time the portrait was painted. He had been married several years, and had a seven-year old son and two other children, who were the subject of another portrait by the same painter done around the same time. Sir Henry Raeburn was Scotland's premier portrait painter.
At first glance, the portrait appears to be just another "aristocrat with horse" painting. Except something seems off-kilter.
In most equestrian paintings, at least of the ones I've seen, if the man is not astride the horse then he is leaning on or standing next to the horse's neck. In this painting, George Harley Drummond is standing next to the horse's saddle, with the horse facing away from the viewer. The curators at the Met put it most delicately: "The foreshortened view of the grazing bay horse is the most complex part of the composition, though not the most important. It is curious, therefore, that the animal's hindquarters should be so prominently displayed."
No, it's not curious, not at all. Not when you look at the painting, and look from the the vapid young man to the horse and back again.
It is a truism in law that the one person you don't stiff is your defense attorney -- because they know where the bodies are buried. Similarly, the one person you should strive to be nice to is your portraitist.
Otherwise, he may let all of posterity know just what a horse's ass you really are.
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