Washington DC has the most horse statues in our entire country. Learn about just a few!

Thanks to Spalding Labs for your partnership with HorseGirlTV®!

Washington DC is many things; the hub of our nations politics, a melting pot of individuals, a history rich area but it also is THE city with the most horse statues in our entire country. Come along for the tour of several of our favorites!

Equestrian Statues
An equestrian statue is a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin “eques”, meaning “knight”, deriving from “equus”, meaning “horse”. A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an “equine statue”. A full-size equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, more recently, military commanders.

Horse Statues in the USA
In the United States, the first three full-scale equestrian sculptures were Clark Mills’ Andrew Jackson (1852), Henry Kirke Brown’s George Washington (1856) for Union Square and Thomas Crawford’s Washington in Richmond, Virginia (1858). Mills was the first American sculptor to overcome the challenge of casting a rider on a rearing horse. The resulting sculpture was so popular he repeated it, for Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Louisiana and Nashville, Tennessee. Cyrus Edwin Dallin made a specialty of equestrian sculptures of American Indians: his Appeal to the Great Spirit stands before the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Robert Gould Shaw Monument in Boston, Massachusetts is a famous relief including an equestrian portrait.