I did the above portrait in oil pastels painting from life as my Thoroughbred stallion , Sunny, grazed in the front yard. The sun must have been hitting his coat especially well to bring out his best colors. Sunny was a sweet gentle horse, rather lazy but otherwise agreeable to anything asked of him. He lived to be a fairly old horse, well past twenty. I have not retouched this portrait at all, just scanned it in. although he was bay in color, for some reason he comes accross as chestnut in this portrait, due no doubt to the dazzling sunlight of the blaze of noon.
 
I painted Sunny for three days straight, and found by the third day that I had virtually ceased to recognize him as "Sunny my adored pet" or even as "a horse." My attention became totally pre-empted by the ever shifting array of shape, light and shadow, and color formed by the sunlight on his coat as he wandered about grazing. The third day's portrait is shown below. A less bright day and probably in the late afternoon.
 
Gertrude Stein asked Henri Matisse whether , when eating a tomato, he looked at it the way an artist would. Matisse replied "No, when I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently."