model posing for Rumors of War series with a horse, 2005. © Kehinde Wiley.

Kehinde Wiley describes working in the tradition of equestrian portraiture in a 2010 Juxtapoz interview:

“I actually brought real horses into the studio, and I was like, ‘something’s wrong here.’ The painters were lying for hundreds of years. They were changing the scale. No man sits that dominant on a horse. So we had to change everything in Photoshop otherwise the men would look pathetic on these huge horses. I mean, look, this guy’s controlling the horse with his pinky…On one hand you’re painting in this masterful, highbrow, renaissance style, yet the subjects are so current I feel like I just passed one of them in the subway this morning…It’s painting about the history of painting, but it’s also painting about your own specific history…My own love affair with this type of painting … as a way of talking about empire and our dominance as a set of countries… evolved into these amazing but perverse vocabularies. So what am I doing? Am I embracing them? Criticizing them? Is it satire? Or is it something more emotionally honest where you’ve fallen in love with the history and pictures? It’s kind of all of that.”