The Royal Mail Coach on the Road

A team on a timetable

The mail coach was a scheduled service, and the horses drawing it were working animals on a clock. That makes this a different category from anything ceremonial or competitive in this register. A coaching picture shows draught in harness: several animals pulling together, matched for the job, controlled from a box rather than from the saddle. The title puts the coach on the road, which is to say in service rather than at rest in a yard.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1841 as the date of creation and the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as the location. The dimensions are 45.7 x 35.1 cm, a small picture of a large subject. Romanticism is the recorded style and British the nationality attached to the painter. Group portraiture accompanies landscape, rural and Animal Art > Horse in the categories, and the measured colour family of the image is ochre.

Harness is evidence, and this entry is not looking at it

Coaching pictures carry a great deal of datable detail in the harness and the vehicle, as this register notes elsewhere. Reading that detail requires the picture. This entry is written from a catalogue record, and it makes no claim about the tack.