Myology of the Horse – Muscle by Muscle

Sometimes, to understand the whole horse, you need to see one muscle at a time.

The drawings I never intended to publish

I remember looking at anatomical study materials and feeling that I understood the words on the page better than I understood the image in front of me. During my equine training, I studied established references, including the work of Robert Barone. Their illustrations were rich with information, but I often struggled to identify one muscle among overlapping structures, partly sectioned tissues and familiar, conventional viewpoints. I respected these books; I simply needed another way to learn from them.

Other teaching sheets showed a skeleton with red dots indicating where muscles attached. Those points were anatomically useful, yet they did not speak to me. I wanted to visualise the missing form: how the muscle travelled between its attachments, what its body might look like, and in which direction its fibres ran.

I began adding the muscles myself, drawing directly over skeletal diagrams. Depending on the subject, I used the outline of the whole horse, the head and neck, a forelimb or a hindlimb. I kept the conventional angles of the material I was studying. These were not illustrations conceived for a book. They were working drawings, made because I was trying to understand something that the red marks alone had not made clear to me.

Then a fellow trainee saw my pages and said something I had not expected: 'That's great. You should publish them.' Until that moment, publication had never been my goal. And there was a problem: I did not think my drawings were very beautiful. They helped me study, but they still looked like study notes.

That comment changed the direction of the project. I wanted to retain the clarity I had gained while giving the drawings a more considered artistic form. I began to focus closely on the part of the horse concerned, rather than always showing the whole skeleton. I looked for views beyond the conventional angles when another perspective could better reveal a muscle's shape and pathway. Using watercolour pencils, I gradually developed an approach that felt both clearer and more expressive.

I wanted aesthetics to serve understanding, not distract from it. I tried to represent the muscles' attachments, their origins and insertions, and the direction of their fibres as faithfully as possible. I am not an anatomist by profession, and I do not pretend that every contour is beyond improvement. What mattered was to approach the structures conscientiously, with anatomical references always close at hand. I also worked on the text, trying to make dense explanations easier to read while preserving essential information on function, nerves and blood vessels.

What started as a personal study method grew beyond anything I had planned. After four years of work, the 240-page French edition was published in 2022 through Camaya. The first 1,000 copies sold out. I am now preparing a first English edition and sharing updates on www.camaya.fr in anticipation of future pre-orders.

The surprising part is that the book began with neither a publishing plan nor an artistic manifesto. It began with a student staring at red dots on a skeleton and trying to see the muscle between them.

Ongoing thread. More from Julia Prével to follow.