#horse

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.

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.