First conceived as a large plaster for cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein’s New York apartment, Nadelman’s sinuous horse sets one delicate hoof on classical tradition, and another on an important French modernist text. Having read Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Nadelman knew the drawings of Constantin Guys who “applied himself to the personal beauty of horses.” Nadelman’s sculpture recalls Guys’ drawings. Nadelman also studied classical antiquities and early cave paintings. Critic Lincoln Kirstein associated Nadelman’s horse with the mythical horses that pulled Poseidon’s chariot across the waters, described in a poem by Constantine Cavafy: “Their bodies, their feet, must clearly show/ they do not tread the earth, but run on the sea.” The BMA’s bronze was cast posthumously, but a smaller life-time cast, exhibited in a New York gallery in 1917, made Nadelman an art star.