In this painting produced for the Walters commission, Miller adhered to the erroneous but widespread practice of the day, inherited from the ancients, of showing the horse in what has been called a “flying gallop,” a pose that was discredited by Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s (although he did photograph dogs in the “flying gallop” and horses often assumed a similar attitude when jumping over an obstacle, when they would have been most easily observed without the aid of Muybridge’s stop-action camera shutter). To add to the sensation of speed, Miller added puffs of dust at the horse’s feet and a windblown affect to the woman’s clothing, hair, and the horse’s tail. (Troccoli, 1990, p. 38; Edgerton, 1936, p. 178; Sandweiss, 2002, p. 286)
