Lipchitz left his native Lithuania to study art in Paris in 1909. There, he adopted the medium of sculpture, often influenced by the stylized forms of ancient Scythian reliefs he had seen in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Acrobat on Horseback celebrates the horse, a significant theme for the Scythian nomads of the steppes. Even more influential for Lipchitz, however, were recent French art and the painter Georges Seurat, especially his last painting, Circus. Seurat’s reductionist, geometric painting style thus inspired an elegant three-dimensional object.