Where the Sporting Records Come From

Sources Sit With the Picture

A list of authorities at the foot of a website supports nothing in particular. The references on this site are attached to individual entries, linked, next to the catalogue values they stand behind.

Where they are present, a value can be followed to its record directly, with no step that requires taking our word for it.

Where they are absent, nothing is hidden and nothing is verified: the sourcing pass has not got there. Most of this register is in exactly that condition, and an entry without a Sources section is a copied record, not a checked one.

The Data We Read

All open, all machine-readable, all checkable by you. Not read here and never suggested: unpublished archives, private correspondence, dissertations, paywalled journals. No one is interviewed, and no institution collaborates with this site.

Museum collection records

Open catalogue APIs. They supply the title a picture is filed under, which is usually where the horse's work — hunt, race, plough, parade — is named, when it is named at all.

Wikidata

Statements for date, material and depicted subject, each backed by an identifier that can be opened separately.

Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)

Painter identity, name variants and dates. It is what keeps a busy sporting painter from splitting into two entries; it holds nothing about horses.

Wikipedia

Background and reception, used to find a primary record rather than to replace one. A pedigree traced only to a Wikipedia paragraph is not traced.

What These Records Do Not Establish

Breed. Bloodline. Which animal a portrait shows, and which race it won. Those live in stud books, sale catalogues, racing calendars and the specialist literature on sporting painting, and this site consults none of them. Where a museum record names the horse, the entry carries the name because the museum did; where it does not, the entry is quiet, and that quiet is a limit rather than a discretion.

Harness, tack and the type of vehicle behind a team are in the same position. What the picture shows is visible to you; what our data holds is only the museum's own words about it.

Two Sources, One Value

Where records conflict, an entry shows a single value with a single source behind it and no comparison. The order of consultation is fixed, the first answer is kept, and the others are dropped before they ever reach a page. Seeing whose value you have is what makes it possible to go and disagree with it elsewhere.

The Commentary Is Not a Source

Those paragraphs come from a language model reading the entry's own fields. They carry no authority and do not belong in a bibliography as scholarship. Cite the record behind a fact; if you want our wording, cite the entry and describe it honestly.

The reasoning is set out in the editorial policy.

Citing an Entry

Each work has a citation page that assembles the reference in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard. It is linked from the artwork page and lives at /cite/{artist}/{title}.

Two things to carry with you. The Master ID is permanent, so later corrections to a title or a URL never change the object your reference names. And where an entry prints a verification date, that is the date to use as last-updated; where it prints none, which is the usual case, use your access date.

Whole-site reference: Horse Oil Paintings, horsespaintings.com.