G iorgio de Chirico's Italian parents moved to Volos, Greece when his father, an engineer, found work there. The exposure to the antique world and the influence of his father’s passion and profession would deeply impact the artist’s style. Classical mythology, history and architecture provided endless sources of inspiration for the young artist, and de Chirico regularly combined such subjects with contemporary settings and motifs. De Chirico spent much of his adolescence wandering through museums and studying the great Italian artistic traditions, particularly the Baroque period, which greatly informed his painterly style.

Painted circa 1928, Cavallo e zebra in riva al mare (Horse and Zebra by the Sea) is a splendid early example of the subject of animals in an enigmatic locale, which was to become one of the most iconic mythological subjects in de Chirico’s oeuvre. He would return to this theme on a frequent basis during the following decades, surrounding his equine figures with antique ruins and classical human figures. In the 1920s, de Chirico abandoned his unique early Surrealist style, which had had a great influence on the group of artists gathered around André Breton, and in turning to the Classical world as a new source of inspiration, he embraced the avant-garde trend led by Pablo Picasso’s Neoclassical period.

In Cavallo e zebra in riva al mare (Horse and Zebra by the Sea), the artist places his horse and zebra within an enigmatic, ancient world that verges between fantasy and realism. He uses the same small, controlled strokes of white paint to delineate the flutes of the fragmented columns that he uses for the horses blowing mane, lending his favorite animal a majestic aura that mirrors the artist’s mystical fascination with the ancient world.