Concept
La Femme au Cheval (also known as Woman with Horse, L'Écuyère and Kvinde med hest) is a large oil painting created toward the end of 1911, early 1912, by the French artist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants (20 March–16 May) in 1912 and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912. The following year La Femme au Cheval was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913). The artist has broken down the picture plane into facets, presenting multiple aspects of the subject in succession and/or simultaneously. This concept first pronounced by Metzinger in 1910—since considered a founding principle of Cubism—would soon find its way into the foundations of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; the fact that a complete description of one and the same subject may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description. The painting was owned by the poet Joseph Houot (known as Jacques Nayral). In 1918 La Femme au Cheval was exhibited at International Kunst, Kleis Kunsthandel, Copenhagen, an exhibition arranged by Herwarth Walden. It was presumably bought by a Danish collector in 1918. The painting was subsequently sold at auction through art dealer Kai Grunth hos Winkel & Magnussen, auction no. 108, February 19, 1932, lot no. 119. Purchased by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. After his death Woman with Horse was sold by his widow Margrethe Bohr (through Ernest Bohr) to the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It is now in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture at the museum. La Femme au Cheval is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 162 × 130.5 cm (63.8 × 51.4 in). As the title indicates the painting represents a woman and a horse. The rather elegant woman wearing only a pearl necklace and the horse are immersed in a landscape with trees and a window (in the 'background'), a vase, with fruits and vegetation (in the 'foreground') clearly taken from the natural world.