2010: Thoroughbred State of the Art
March 1st until October 31st 2010: Gallery 5
Charles II was a great enthusiast for horse racing. After he was restored to the throne in 1660, following the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, racing became a serious pastime. Greater thought went into the breeding of better racehorses with more speed and stamina. At the same time a new genre of painting emerged to portray the champion horses and the events on the racecourse.
For the next three hundred years artists recorded the changes in the form of the racehorse and the way racing has been conducted. There have been many influences on what artists have produced: the expectations of their patrons and how they wanted their horses to be seen, the technical skills of the artists, the output of their peers, and the introduction of competition from photography.
Paintings by Stubbs, Munnings, Wootton, Herring and others have been specially selected to illustrate the two main themes of racing art – the portrait of the racehorse and the movement of the horse since the late Seventeenth Century. The exhibition has been produced jointly by the National Horseracing Museum and the British Sporting Art Trust using works of art from their collections enhanced by loan pictures from the Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum, the Jockey Club and private collections.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Under Starter’s Orders, Newmarket Start, Cries of ‘No, No, Sir’ (1957) by Sir Alfred Munnings. This is one of his largest paintings and depicts The Start – the one part of the race that fascinated Sir Alfred and presented him with what he thought was his greatest challenge.
The earliest portrait is The English Racehorse by John Baptist Closterman (c1690). Portraits follow this from John Wootton, George Stubbs, J. F. Herring senior, Isidore Bonheur, Emil Adam, Lynwood Palmer and John Skeaping.
Movement has been more difficult to capture. For most of the Eighteenth Century artists stuck to the traditional ‘rocking horse’ style with the two hind legs planted on the ground to provide the thrust of the galloping stride with two fore legs stretched out in front. This convention is seen in the work of Peter Tillemans in about 1720 and James Seymour in the 1740s.
The first artist to challenge this convention was George Stubbs in his picture of Baronet painted in 1791. Although Stubbs does not get it right, the convention changes to follow Stubbs and show all four feet off the ground. J F Herring develops it into the more stylised ‘ventre-a-terre’ [stomach to the ground]. The convention continued until Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer, shows how the horse really gallops.