Eclipse

by Nicholas Clee

  Stubbs and his anonymous backer knew all about segmenting the market. They offered various methods of purchase: you could buy the whole lot of pictures in advance, or you could buy single numbers, or single prints. At the time of the advertisement, there were already sixteen paintings on show in the gallery. One of them was of Eclipse, and another of his sire Marske. There were, however, never any more than those sixteen paintings, and just one number of the Review of the Turf appeared. Perhaps the subscription figures were disappointing? In any event, the £9, 000 promised to Stubbs did not materialize.

  The Prince of Wales and Andrew Dennis O’Kelly have both been associated with the Review of the Turf. The Prince was already a patron of Stubbs’s work. Among his commissions was a portrait, showing him on horseback, with two terriers running ahead, by the Serpentine in Hyde Park. According to Stubbs’s biographer Robin Blake, Prinny’s obesity is ‘carefully concealed’. Judy Egerton, in her magnificent Catalogue Raisonné of Stubbs’s works, viewed the portrait differently, brusquely summarizing it as ‘an overweight bully riding a long-suffering horse’. The two Stubbsexperts arrived at varying conclusions too (though amicably) about the funding of the Review of the Turf. Blake agreed with the suggestion, advanced by others before him, that ‘Turf’ was George Augustus, the Prince of Wales; hence the reticence – shown both by Ozias Humphry and by ‘T.N.’, Stubbs’s obituarist in The Sporting Magazine – over the patron’s identity. The Prince would have wanted to be discreet about his association with a business venture, and following the Escape affair, in which he had been accused of setting up a betting coup, 147 he was not enjoying high esteem among the racing set who would be Stubbs’s main customers. His indebtedness would also explain the non-appearance of the funding.

  Holders of this theory, Judy Egerton suggested, may have fallen into the ‘Great Expectations fallacy’ – the belief that a mysterious benefactor must be a grand personage. She advanced a different notion, with support from David Oldrey, former deputy senior steward of the Jockey Club: that ‘Turf’ was Andrew Dennis O’Kelly, in a surreptitious ploy to hype his stallions. Oldrey’s principal evidence is that Dungannon, Volunteer and Anvil, the three contemporary stallions in the first Review of the Turf exhibition, all stood at the O’Kelly stud. Dungannon may have been worthy of an appearance in the Review (though eventually his record as a sire was disappointing), but Volunteer and Anvil were unproven, and sat oddly in a collection that also featured indisputable Thoroughbred giants such as the Godolphin Arabian, Marske and Eclipse. Of Anvil, the catalogue copy said that he ‘may be ranked amongst the best stallions of the present day, and from the cross of the Eclipse mares in Mr O’Kelly’s stud, with the blood of King Herod, much may be expected from this horse’. This was hype, and Andrew, and his father Philip, would have been embarrassed to be revealed as the authors of it.

  To back up this view, Egerton pointed out the unlikelihood of the Prince of Wales, with business to transact with Stubbs, leaving his apartments in Carlton House to visit the painter in Somerset Street: he would have issued a summons instead. True; but the Prince could have commissioned an associate – perhaps Sheridan, who acted for him during the Escape affair – to pay the visit on his behalf. In response to Egerton’s second argument, that Prinny was in no position to offer advances of up to £9, 000, one might point out that an inability to match his expenditure to his financial circumstances was Prinny’s regular failing. His racing interests were also represented in the first group of paintings and prints: Anvil had run under his colours; and there was also Stubbs’s Baronet at Speed with Samuel Chifney Up, portraying the horse and jockey who had won for the Prince the 1791 Oatlands Handicap.

  The O’Kelly papers do not help us, so we fall back on speculation. We have seen enough of the O’Kelly way of doing business to suggest a compromise solution to the Review of the Turf mystery: that there was a partnership of some kind between the Prince of Wales and Andrew. The arrangements would have been exceptionally complicated, involving breeding rights at the O’Kelly stud and various other considerations. However, subsequent events intervened. The Prince, engulfed in scandal and debt, sold his racehorses; the O’Kellys found that they could not offload the mares at their stud; the outbreak of war with France caused an atmosphere of financial uncertainty. The ambitious project collapsed. Andrew continued to acquire work by Stubbs nonetheless, and by 1809 he owned, according to John Lawrence, one of the largest collections of the artist’s work.

  Stubbs’s portrait of Eclipse for the Review of the Turf is a copy of his 1770 Eclipse at Newmarket, with a Groom and Jockey, which hangs now in the Jockey Club Rooms in Newmarket. (The 1770 original is in private hands.) In Judy Egerton’s expert view, while Eclipse is ‘finely modelled’ in the later version, ‘the handling of the groom and jockey is more awkward’, and the paint surface is‘thin’. In The Sporting Magazine, the two human figures were described as ‘the boy who looked after [Eclipse], and Samuel Merrit, who generally rode him’. Whether the jockey really was Samuel Merriott is discussed elsewhere.148 The labelling of the adult-looking groom as ‘the boy’ was a mark of the status of stable staff; today, they remain ‘lads’ and ‘lasses’.

  A print of this picture (see this book’s colour section) hangs above my desk as I write. Eclipse, saddled, stands before a square brick building with a pitched roof of yellowish tiles. We know, from a landscape study by Stubbs of the same scene, that the building is the four-miles stables rubbing-house at the start of the Newmarket Beacon Course, and can therefore speculate that the scene is the prelude to what may have been Eclipse’s toughest race, his match of 17 April 1770 against Bucephalus.149 Eclipse has a cropped tail and a plaited mane. Light makes gleaming patterns on his chestnut coat. His body is long; he has an athletic elegance. Behind him, the Newmarket heath stretches towards a modest row of trees. The horizon is a quarter way up the picture, and the big sky above is springlike, with massing white and dark clouds.

  The ‘boy’, smartly dressed in a black coat, holds Eclipse’s reins, and looks over his shoulder, with what may be apprehension, at the jockey. This groom has had to get Eclipse to Newmarket, keep him fed and watered and healthy and happy, and present him in perfect condition on the day. Now he transfers the responsibility, and all he can do is wait and watch. Eclipse is looking at the jockey too; and Merriott – if it is he – returns the look, calmly. Without that calm, he could not do his job – no matter how good his horse may be. He wears the red colours with a black cap that Dennis O’Kelly had appropriated from William Wildman on buying Eclipse; he carries a whip, but as if reassuring the horse he will not use it, and he does not wear spurs on his boots, reminding us that Eclipse ‘never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur’.150

  As so often in Stubbs’s work, what we witness here is a quiet, contemplative moment apart from the action. Every element of the scene is beautifully placed, so that, in spite of Merriott’s striding posture, the painting conveys stillness. The horse and his rider are about to offer a demonstration of greatness, in front of cheering crowds. But Stubbs does not show these jubilant events, either in this or in any other of his paintings. When he does show a race, in his portrait of Gimcrack at Newmarket, the contest is only a trial, climaxing in front of a shuttered stand; it has taken place in the past, and is in the background of the picture, while the foreground has Gimcrack with his stable staff at the rubbing-house. There is in Stubbs’s paintings a very British mix, apparent too in the poetry of Tennyson and the music of Elgar, of grandeur and melancholy.

  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 collect
or (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 hisbrother, 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 isthe 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 h
is 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.