Eclipse (31 page)

The portrait of Eclipse borrows from a study Stubbs made of the horse, with a plain background behind. The study, donated by the late American collector (and owner of the great horse Mill Reef) Paul Mellon, hangs now in the Royal Veterinary College, facing Eclipse's skeleton.

Stubbs had also used this study for
Eclipse with William Wildman and His Sons John and James
(see colour section). This affectingly informal portrait places Wildman and his sons with Eclipse beneath a giant, forked oak tree. The Surrey downs fall away behind them. Wildman, seated on the trunk of the tree, is pointing – perhaps to his sons, perhaps to the horse. The boys wear tricorn hats as he does, and are finely dressed in blue coats, waistcoats and breeches. The older holds Eclipse's reins; the younger leans casually against the tree, with his hand on the shoulder of his
brother, who turns back to say something to him. They look affectionate, and happy, and proud of their horse.
¹⁵¹

Stubbs's painting stayed in the Wildman family until the early twentieth century, and after various transactions crossed the Atlantic, to be bought in 1929 by William Woodward, chairman of the American Jockey Club. At about this time a clumsy restoration job was done on it. Having since received more skilled attention, it hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The intimate atmosphere of
Eclipse with William Wildman and His Sons
suggests a close relationship between painter and owner. Wildman may also appear in a series of four Stubbs paintings showing two gentlemen on a day's shooting expedition on the Duke of Portland's estate. Robert Fountain and Judy Egerton discussed the possible identification, though with caveats; the brown-coated man who may be Wildman does not bear a very close resemblance to the figure in the Eclipse portrait. But Wildman did own this series. Other Stubbs works in his collection – at that time, the largest aside from the Prince of Wales's – included portraits of Marske, Gimcrack and Euston; further portraits of horses, grooms and gamekeepers; a painting of a horse frightened by a lioness; and various dogs.

If you cannot afford Stubbs, one collector of the time advised his friend, try George Garrard. Certainly, Garrard (1760–1826) fills the runner-up spot among contemporary painters of Eclipse. His portrait, dated to 1788 (see colour section), shows

Eclipse the stallion, with a typically muscly, powerful neck, and a high crest. The horse stands against a background of thick woods – near the ones, we may conjecture, in which he was rumoured to have roamed in his younger days, when his rider Ellers would take him poaching. Garrard's painting is cruder than Stubbs's work, but in compensation conveys Eclipse's strength and power.

The kinds of early representations of the Thoroughbred that one has come to think of as typical of the era are the portraits in which Francis Sartorius (1734–1804) and his son John Nost Sartorius (1759–1828) specialized. Their horses have spindly frames, with long and oddly curved necks; they gallop like rocking horses, with all four legs splayed out at once. The absurdity of this stride was not the painters' fault: no artists then understood how horses moved, because they could not distinguish the motions of the legs with the naked eye. Stubbs may have sensed that something was wrong with the traditional way of representing horses at the gallop, and for that reason – and because he was not an enthusiast for the sport – rarely depicted racing scenes. Of one of the rare exceptions,
Baronet at Speed with Samuel Chifney Up
, a contemporary critic commented, ‘There is something very singular in this picture, the horse's legs are all off the ground, at that moment when raised by muscular strength – a bold attempt, and as yet well perfected, this attitude has never been yet described but by Mr Stubbs.'

Stubbs was only half right. A horse
is
airborne briefly during a gallop. But, as the photographer Eadweard Muybridge was to demonstrate some eighty years later, this moment occurs when the legs are tucked under the body. Muybridge's photographic sequence,
The Horse in Motion
, showed that when the legs extended, one rear leg and one foreleg hit the ground first (though not at the same time), and that the others (the ‘lead' legs) followed, extending further. For a moment, one leg and then two support half a ton of animal.
¹⁵²

Clearly, Francis Sartorius had no inkling of these mechanics when he attempted to paint Eclipse at full speed. While the result is, in the words of Theodore Cook,
¹⁵³
‘somewhat impossible', it does at least convey the horse's huge stride, and reveals a distinctive, and rather ungainly, head carriage, level with his body. The title of one picture names the jockey in the red and black as John Oakley, adding to our doubts about whether Oakley or Merriott – named by Stubbs – was Eclipse's usual partner. A further Sartorius is a rare depiction of a walkover: Eclipse and his jockey are making their leisurely way towards a King's Plate. The course, narrow and climbing and marked with white posts, seems better suited to cross-country runs than to horse races.

John Nost made use of his father's studies, in one instance placing copies of Francis's portraits of Eclipse and of the stallion Shakespeare side by side in a single composition. Why he did so is not clear. Perhaps he believed the rumours that Shakespeare, rather than Marske, was Eclipse's sire. It may be relevant that John Nost lived in Carshalton, near to the O'Kelly stud at Epsom and to the farm where Shakespeare had stood for a while. Although Shakespeare's owners – if they commissioned the portrait – could gain no commercial advantage from it (their horse being dead by the time of composition in the 1780s), they may have wanted it for sentimental reasons.

The Sartoriuses were simply in business to give sporting patrons what they wanted, and their paintings reflect no greater ambition than that. Stubbs had to satisfy patrons too, but he created work with a more ambiguous tone. The nobility of his animals is inscrutable, and vulnerable; the humans merely associate with it. A contemporary artist who has recast that ambiguity in more blatant terms is Mark Wallinger, winner of the 2007 Turner Prize. Wallinger invokes Eclipse in his series entitled
Race, Class, Sex
,
paintings of four of Eclipse's male-line descendants. The portraits are life-size, in a hyper-realist style, and set against white backgrounds. According to copy in a catalogue of Wallinger's work, they are a ‘recasting of a historical painting genre in terms of the rhetoric of the stud book'. Moreover, they ‘can be read in terms of a discourse on representation itself'. The only radical quality of these themes is the jargon accompanying them: Stubbs managed all of this, and more.

Like Eclipse, Dennis O'Kelly was immortalized by one of the greatest artists of the day. There is no record of Dennis's acquaintanceship with Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), though his presence in a series of Rowlandson prints is a clue that the two were familiar.

Educated at the Royal Academy, Rowlandson started out as a serious painter, but turned to more immediately remunerative caricatures after squandering a £7, 000 inheritance – some of it going to Dennis, perhaps – at the gaming tables of London. With a relish for teeming, anarchic scenes, he excelled at depicting racecourses, with their shady gambling booths, riotous beer tents, lecherous men, loose women and conspiring punters.

The dating of these pictures places them after Dennis's death. Dennis appears shabbily dressed, with stomach bulging above his breeches, wearing a tricorn hat containing some sort of leafy arrangement,
¹⁵⁴
and – no doubt because of his gout – carrying a crutch. In
The Betting Post
(see colour section), he is weighing down a small, rotund pony. The Prince of Wales, already at this young age (he must be in his early twenties) showing signs of corpulence, is also on horseback, and has his arm outstretched, striking a bet. The tightly grouped pack of men are all clamouring and gesticulating; only Dennis, who sits slightly detached from the crowd, makes no movement. The implication may be that he is
the knowing one, the man with a sure grasp of how this race will turn out.

In
The Mount
, Dennis stands before a jockey being helped into his riding gear, and gives instructions with an emphatic gesture of his hand. In
The Course
, he is a figure in the boisterous crowd; he is walking on his crutch and holding a hand to his head, as if in despair at some loss.
Colonel Dennis O'Kelly Making a Deal
(shown in this book's colour section) again shows Dennis, this time with his back to us, giving instructions to a jockey. Why is that ‘making a deal'? Perhaps there was a case of mistaken identity when the picture was named, and Dennis was taken for one of the gentlemen examining a horse in the foreground. Or perhaps Dennis's deal with the jockey is somewhat shady.

Dennis may also be the gambler in military uniform in Rowlandson's
A Kick-up at a Hazard Table
, published in 1787, the year Dennis died. He has an empty pocket book, and with a pointed pistol is accusing the man opposite him of cheating. The man brandishes his own pistol – less convincingly – in return, clutches his winnings, and cowers. There is a great hubbub round the table: a spectator holds a chair aloft, and is about to bring it down on Dennis's arm; another is about to tackle Dennis's opponent; some gamblers reach for their swords, while others attempt to get out of the way. Joseph Grego, an early authority on Rowlandson's caricatures, said that the incident that inspired this print took place at the Royal Chocolate House in St James's, and was broken up by guardsmen, ‘who were compelled to knock the parties down with the butt ends of their muskets'.

An earlier caricature of Dennis, by an artist called Mansergh, is entitled
The Eclipse Macarony
. A macarony (or macaroni) was a dandy – a word that evokes a young, slender, foppish figure. But Dennis, perched on a horse at the betting post and again wearing a hat with a leafy motif, is gross. His rounded chin juts out over floppy jowls. A substantial, collared coat emphasizes his bulk.

Thus, in their contrasting styles, Rowlandson and Stubbs paid tributes to Dennis and Eclipse: the burly rogue and the gracious equine athlete. It would be pleasing to claim that Eclipse, the greatest racer Stubbs painted, inspired his greatest work. But, superb though the three pictures are, they yield to a still greater portrait that Stubbs was to paint, at the age of seventy-five, of Eclipse's grandson – Hambletonian.

¹⁴⁷
See chapter 17.

¹⁴⁸
See chapter 8 and Appendix 1.

¹⁴⁹
Eclipse's other race on the Beacon Course took place later that year, on 3 October, against Sir Charles Bunbury's Corsican.

¹⁵⁰
From John Lawrence's
The History and Delineation of the Horse
(1809).

¹⁵¹
It is possible that one or both of these boys did not survive William Wildman. The nomenclature and the dates are confusing. Robert Fountain, author of
William Wildman and George Stubbs
, said that the elder son was called William. (Perhaps he was called John William, or William John.)

¹⁵²
A ‘rotatory' motion, or ‘cross-cantering', involves different front and rear leads. For dogs, a rotatory motion when running is normal.Unable to find any records for William, he speculated that the boy died before his father did (in 1784). Fountain also said that James died in 1827, at the age of fifty-four; so James could not have appeared in
William Wildman and His Sons
, if Stubbs painted it before Wildman sold Eclipse in 1770. See chapter 11.

¹⁵³
In
Eclipse and O'Kelly
.

¹⁵⁴
It may be, as a badge of the land of his birth, clover.

T
HIS CHAPTER AND THE
next are about the extraordinary influence that Eclipse has exerted, through his male line, on the development of racing. It tells the stories of the Eclipse descendants who have been at the centre of some of the most significant or dramatic events in the sport. They include the inspirer of the greatest equine painting; the Derby winner that never was; the Derby winner that avenged Waterloo; and the Derby winner that broke a gambler's heart. There is the colt who did not run in the Derby, or in any other Classic, but who became the Eclipse of the nineteenth century. There are two of the fastest fillies on the Turf. There is the supreme steeplechaser, nicknamed simply ‘Himself'. There is the colt who was the last winner of the English Triple Crown, but who could not give of his best in the race that was supposed to confirm his greatness. There is the American champion who, in the final leg of the Triple Crown, left the rest nowhere. I might have included many others: the great Italian champion Ribot; Sea Bird, an even greater horse than Secretariat, according to some; Red Rum, the triple Grand National winner; Shergar, winner of the Epsom Derby by a record margin. Through them all, the Eclipse bloodline helped shape racing as it is today. But the horses that follow seem to me to have played important parts in Turf history.