Nègre à cheval

Held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon and listed with a date of 1850 — again impossible given Géricault's death in 1824 — this canvas depicting a Black man on horseback reflects the range of human types Géricault engaged with throughout his career. His sustained interest in Black subjects — evident in his portraits of Black men, his studies for The Raft of the Medusa, and other works — distinguished him from most of his contemporaries as an artist genuinely attentive to human beings beyond the dominant European typology. The equestrian subject would have engaged his deepest painterly interests simultaneously with a subject that challenged the racial conventions of European painting. The work's dating discrepancy raises the same questions of attribution and collection cataloguing as other works in the Brussels group.

An equestrian portrait involving a Black subject requires the same careful management of skin tone in relation to the surrounding landscape and atmosphere as any portraiture, with the additional complexity of rendering equine anatomy simultaneously. Géricault's approach to skin of African origin was characteristically direct and observational rather than applying stylizing conventions.