Rosalie’s favourite: ‘Two Horses in a Landscape’ by Hans Memling
Whenever I see a horse I look for a horn between its ears. I hope to see unicorns everywhere. You could almost walk past it because it is so small and hangs unobtrusively in the corner of the room, but something in the painting makes me curious. No, they aren’t unicorns but what’s that on the back of the white horse? The white horse has its head right down to the ground as if it is eating or drinking and the brown horse looks slightly to the left. What could it be looking at? I want to know more about it.
It says on the Boijmans website that it ‘was probably the right shutter of a diptych of an allegory of love. On the left shutter, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, there is a portrait of a woman with a flower in her hand, a sign that she is in love.’ I think perhaps the painter or the woman was actually mad about horses, as I am about unicorns, and they thought that monkeys were just really nice animals, or they had a monkey as a pet, and so the spirit of the monkey got on to the horse. And as her love for horses was so great, and the monkey was her favourite pet, wouldn’t it be really nice to bring the two paintings back together? So that the woman can look at her horses, and the horse can look at the woman. And perhaps until then the painting in Boijmans could be hung on the right so that the horse could enjoy looking into the room and not at the wall.
