Glossary: Horse Racing and the Art market

The art market and horse racing are not necessarily two subjects that you would associate with one another, but they are inextricably linked through the social context of the sport and the artist’s desire to capture those wonderfully vibrant images that occur on great racing occasions.
Since the 18th century the sport has been a fertile ground for painters of all mediums with its natural appeal of the animals and the spectacle of racing. It was, and is, a sport for the very rich. But it is also a sport that can be enjoyed by everyone through horse racing. The first sporting paintings were portraits of favourite and winning horses accompanied by panoramic works of ‘starts’ and finishes’ at race courses. These pictures were often engraved to gain a wider audience and this became a favourite medium of the 18th and 19th centuries. The list of great artists who painted equestrian subjects reads like a who’s who of the world’s great painters including such luminaries as Stubbs, Marshall, Herring and Munnings. In the 20th century one of the great horse painters was Raoul Millais, the son of J. G Millais the great naturalist artist and the grandson of Sir John Everrit Millais. I was fortunate and privileged to know the man over a number of years and I purchased many fine paintings from him ranging from a magnificent sketch of Gordon Richards ‘up’ on Abanant to a pair of stallions fighting. Raoul was the most modest of men who having broken his back in the 1930’s and being told he would never walk again, proceeded to fight in the last world war and ride to hounds. He was still a magnificent shot into his 90’s and only gave up just before his death.
His finished paintings were a triumph of artistic endeavour, but I believe history will view him as one of the greatest sketchers of the 20th century with an eye for immediacy that has seldom been matched. He told me the story of a time at Newmarket when he had been working on some oils for a later work. A man walked over to him and asked how long the picture had taken to paint. Raoul, not a man who suffered fools gladly, looked the man up and down and said ’five minutes, oh and 50 years’! He could not abide the thought that time equalled quality and his maxim was always that less was more.
Sporting paintings can be very expensive and the market is extensively invested in. Over the years good Equestrian art has performed well in relation to the stock market and can be classed as ‘blue chip’.
Here at room4art.com™ you will usually find a few examples of Equestrian art that that are not prohibitively expensive, in fact I believe them to be very good value for money. At the present moment we have some fine anatomical horse studies by Barbara Lady Brassey executed from life in the 1930’s. These represent great value for money and are of high quality. As Raoul Millais should have said ‘5 minutes and fifty years plus a lifetime’s enjoyment for you’.

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