This carefully rendered study depicts a man using all his strength to push a large snake from his body, his eyes trained on the flailing tail that might strike at any moment. Ward made this canvas in preparation for a larger painting, now lost but known through a full compositional study. In the final painting, the snake winds around the body of a white horse, snatching the rider from its back. Given the artist’s opposition to Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, it seems likely he intended this composition as an allegory of slavery, which at the time had yet to be abolished.
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
