#horse

The story goes that she rode through Coventry with nothing on to shame her husband into cutting the town's taxes. From what I've read the tale only turns up a couple of hundred years after she'd actually died, so nobody thinks it happened — Coventry has run with it anyway, processions and all.

This comes out of the old Russian folk epics, where a rider reaches a stone that spells out which road kills him and which one ruins him. From what I can find the painter chewed on this subject for years, redoing it more than once before settling on this version, and he spent a lot of his career on folk tales and stage designs when most of his colleagues were painting contemporary life.