Supporting Horse Oil Paintings
Free to read, no advertising, compiled by one person
There is no paywall on this register, no account to create, no advertising on the page and no tracking script. Everything in it is open to anyone who finds it.
It is worth saying where the effort goes, because this genre is more expensive to catalogue than its reputation suggests.
Why records for this genre cost more
Most of it was never in a museum
Sporting pictures hung in houses and stables, and a large share of the corpus has never had a published catalogue record at all. Establishing a date or a support often means an auction record or a county history rather than an API call.
The titles are silent
Only about a third of these works mention a horse in the title. The rest have to be found through subject tagging and then read individually, and each one that turns out to be a landscape with a cart in the corner is time spent for nothing.
Same surname, four generations
Herrings, Sartoriuses and Alkens overlap for a century. Separating a father's picture from a son's means checking life dates against an authority file for every entry rather than trusting the label.
Images that cannot be used
For a good part of this catalogue the only photograph in existence belongs to an auction house or a private owner. Those entries take longer, because the alternative to reproducing an image is describing the work well enough that the entry still earns its place.
What helps
Buy a reproduction
Entries for works in the public domain link to a hand-painted reproduction. That is the only revenue this register has. There is no subscription, no membership and no donation form.
Send what you know
First-hand knowledge — a sale you attended, a picture you have seen, a book that corrects a date — is the scarce resource in this field. It is more useful here than money.
Nothing here needs signing up for. If this register helped you place a picture, or told you which Herring painted it, that is what it exists for.
← Back to the catalogue