Exercising the Royal Horses

Exercise is a job too

The title names neither a race nor a journey but maintenance: animals being worked to keep them fit for work. It is the least dramatic category in this catalogue and one of the most informative, because it describes the routine everything else depends on. A racing animal, a carriage pair and the mount in a state portrait all require the same daily hours from somebody.

Whose horses

The title says royal, which attaches the animals to a household rather than to a named person. In this catalogue that is a functional statement: an establishment large enough to keep horses that are exercised by staff. No individual, no stable and no date beyond the year of creation is recorded.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1855 and the location is the Yale Centre For British Art (Yale University), in New Haven, one of 16 records here held under a Yale line. The dimensions are not recorded. Romanticism is the recorded style, British the recorded nationality, and the measured colour family of the image is brown. A rural landscape heading accompanies Animal Art > Horse.