The Gallop

Racecourse and hunting field: the genre that paid British animal painters, and where the horse is the wager.

Racing produced a market before it produced a genre. Owners wanted their winner recorded, which is why so many of these pictures are portraits of a named animal standing in profile with a groom, and why the artist was often paid per horse. The flying gallop — all four legs stretched — was painted for a century before photography proved no horse ever moves that way, and the pictures made after that proof look different.