Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 it was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from their polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king generously handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

Robinet Testard shows a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It’s at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, the fourteenth letter in his Heroines.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill in his Sisyphean task, the Danaïds haven’t been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, and completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, now hanging in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), now decorating the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, yet again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the horse in narrative, I showed examples from classical myths and legends, culminating in that of Saint George and the dragon. This leads to the role of the horse in chivalry, with its origins in the crusades.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Walter Crane is one of the earlier artists to depict a late fifteenth century poem revived in a ballad from 1819 by John Keats. The Belle Dame Sans Merci is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, as the knight, clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand.

The same year that Keats wrote his ballad, Lord Byron wrote his poetic account of the legendary Mazeppa, who was bound naked to a wild horse and set loose as punishment for his affair with a Polish Countess.

Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa and the Wolves from 1826 shows the young victim during his wild ride that took him to the point of death before he was rescued.

Mykola Samokish’s watercolour of a Ukrainian Cossack on a Horse, or Haidamak on a Horse from 1899 shows a haidamaka, a Ukrainian insurgent who took part in uprisings against the ruling Polish Empire that governed west Ukraine in the eighteenth century. They were immortalised in an epic poem in 1841 by the father of Ukrainian literature Taras Shevchenko.

Horses are a longstanding feature of circuses, and individual showmen and women around the world.

Georges Seurat’s The Circus from 1891 is one of the masterpieces of Divisionism, and may depict a scene in the Cirque Fernando of Montmartre in Paris. Its internal contradiction is the artist’s choice of a painstakingly slow and mechanical method of painting, for a motif that is full of spontaneous movement and action.

In the millennia before the arrival of steam engines, horses were the fastest means of travel, and inevitably were used in racing.

In February 1817, Théodore Géricault witnessed the Roman Carnival, with its traditional horse race. Among the studies that he made of that event is Race of the Barberi Horses (1817), intended for a later large studio painting that he never started. This was a longstanding tradition of the Roman Carnival, where these horses were gathered in the Piazza del Popolo, then raced without riders to gallop down the Corso to be recaptured at the finish. The Barberi are a hardy North African breed popular among the Berbers, and are still bred today although this race has long since ceased.

More orderly horseraces have been popular events.

Géricault’s The Epsom Derby from 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air, legs in full extension, without contact with the ground beneath them. It wasn’t until early photographic studies demonstrated that this never occurred in real life that artists reluctantly changed their images.

The Derby Stakes is a flat-race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At this time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here. It was accompanied by a large fair, the subject of a later painting by William Powell Frith in 1858. I suspect that Géricault’s version was a significant influence on the later equestrian paintings of Edgar Degas.

The New World of the Americas grew their own stories about feats achieved by horses and their riders.

Grant Wood’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) was inspired by Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride (1860), telling of the American patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818) and his midnight ride on 18 April 1775, to alert colonial militia of the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is shown using a bird’s eye view giving it an air of unreality.

My last two paintings are even more unreal.

Long before Courbet’s well-known allegorical painting of his studio, Horace Vernet painted his as being just as crowded, rich in stories, and puzzling. In the centre, two young men fight one another with swords by a white horse, which is tethered to the wall. Immediately in front of the white horse is a pair of boxers, and another young man sits on the back of a chair to watch the fencing, holding a rifle against the left side of his body.

In the left background a couple of pupils are actually engaged in painting at easels, but the most prominent easel in the room is completely ignored by those present. Another painter is at work at the far left, apparently talking with three young men who are watching, and accompanied by a drummer. Another small group of young men is engaged in discussion against the wall to the left.

Henry Fuseli’s breakthrough painting of his career, The Nightmare from 1781 was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy, and remains the work by which he is best known. It shows a daemonic incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman, who is laid out as if in a deep sleep in bed, her head thrown back, and her arms above her head. Lurking in the darkness to the left is the head of a black horse, whose eyes appear unseeing. The incubus stares directly at the viewer in a manner which arouses discomfort.

Since its domestication somewhere on the steppe of Ukraine and south-western Russia around five millennia ago, humans have been dependent on the horse as a means of transport and drawing wheeled vehicles of many kinds. By the late eighteenth century the work they’re capable of was used as the basis for the measurement of power, in the horsepower, that became most popular when they were being replaced first by steam engines, and then the noisy and smelly motor vehicles of the twentieth century.

These two articles look at horses of conventional design; those with wings have been covered here, and the story of the unicorn in this article.

In Greek and Roman myth, the sun is drawn across the heavens by Phoebus’ chariot, with four horses, usually named Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon, in harness.

They are shown in Gustave Moreau’s Chariot of Apollo, or Phoebus Apollo from about 1880, in a prelude to the myth of Phaethon, who lost control of it and set the world on fire when his adventure went wrong.

While several deities are drawn in their chariots by unusual creatures, Pluto opts for a pair of suitably black horses.

Walter Crane’s account of The Fate of Persephone (1878) shows her at the moment of her abduction, still holding her posy. Pluto has pulled up in his chariot, and is gripping her right arm, ready to make off with her into the dark cavern to the right, taking the couple down to Hades.

Chariots of mortals were conventionally drawn by a pair of horses. Franz von Matsch’s The Triumph of Achilles (1892) shows Achilles in his chariot driving at speed around the walls of Troy, towing the naked body of Hector and followed by celebrating Greeks.

Troy was also the site of the greatest deception using a horse, although in this case it was a huge wooden model containing a team of Greek commandos who were to open the city up for the rest of their army to enter.

Tiepolo’s Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (1773) is one of his series showing the construction and entry of the horse into the city. He follows accounts that refer to Troy’s women and children hauling the structure using lines, and some reporting that it was ostensibly an apology for the theft of the Palladium.

Subsequently, the term Trojan Horse has entered the languages of Europe, although that isn’t the case for the Roman hero Marcus Curtius, whose leap saved the city of Rome.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leap of Marcus Curtius (c 1850-1855) depicts the brief legend of this hero of classical Rome. Following an earthquake (now dated to 362 BCE), a great bottomless chasm opened up in the middle of the Forum. Attempts to fill it were unsuccessful, so an augur was consulted, who responded that the gods demanded the most precious possession of the state. Marcus Curtius was a young soldier who proclaimed that arms and the courage of Romans were the state’s most precious possessions. In a moment of supreme self-sacrifice, he then rode into the pit in his finest armour, astride his charger, the moment shown here. As he and his horse fell into its abyss, the chasm closed over him, and the city was saved.

Horses feature in many other legends from around the world. Among the more curious is that of Lady Godiva, who is claimed to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry, England, in protest at her husband’s swingeing taxes.

Jules Lefebvre’s first painting of Lady Godiva from 1891 shows her passing over deserted narrow cobbled streets, covering her breasts and appearing in some distress. Her horse is being led by a maid, and flying alongside are three white doves. She appears almost saintly in her mission, as if undergoing a form of psychological martyrdom.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses from 1892 is one of a series of paintings he made fusing the horses drawing Poseidon’s chariot with near-breaking waves, popularly known in English as white horses.

Another widespread legend is that of Saint George, a knightly Christian who slayed a dragon to save a princess. He is claimed by several countries across Europe as far as Georgia, and is patron saint of England.

Around 1553-55, Tintoretto retold his story in his small masterpiece of Saint George and the Dragon. The saint, the dragon and the Princess have escaped the confines of his earlier votive painting of this motif, and here run free in a rich green coastal landscape of the artist’s invention. George is locked in battle with the dragon and the Princess flees from the scene in terror. The dragon’s last victim still lies on the grass, his blue clothing in tatters. Above them and the massive walls of a distant fortress is the figure of God, in a brilliant mandorla in the heavens.

That leads us to tomorrow’s sequel, which starts with horses in chivalry.