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Elise and Aarie
“Elise and Aarie,” Patty Miller Stables, Buckingham 2019.
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George Wahington
“George Washington at Dorchester Heights”, 1806, by Gilbert Stuart.
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Mo
“Mo”, 2020. The bangs cut buckskin-colored Buckingham horse on the Lynd property.
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Henry IV
Yale English department Chair David Scott Kastan as Shakespeare’s “King Henry V”, for Sterling Publishing 2002
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Allie
“Allie”, 2020.
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Ellie Riding Sawyer
“Ellie ridding Sawyer (Samuel Clemens)”, 2019. Although imposing and powerful, the horse was actually afraid of treading water.
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Margaret and Allie
“Margaret and Allie at Come Along Farm” 2020, the subject of her upcoming book “The Parables of Sunlight”, Come Along Farm”, Pipersville, 2020.
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Irish Horse
“Emily riding her Irish horse Rodney (Calingford Tully Happy)”, 2019
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Come Along Farm
"Come Along Farm," Pipersville, 2020.
by Glenn Harrington
The low, diminished light and cold temperatures of February work strange things on the minds of many of us living in the stark, winter woods of Bucks County. The festive holidays have wrapped up, and the hope of spring is too distant to stop us from hallucinating a greener, warmer oasis somewhere further south. Talk of moving to Chile begins, but the pronunciation sounds cold, and is immediately replaced by alternatives: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico ... galloping slowly further north until we all return to our slushy senses, settling finally on Doylestown. Of course, these wild winter forays are brought on by the lack of vitamin D and sunlight, and we now face the cruel month by preemptively preparing with therapeutic UV lamps and cholecalciferol tablets.
This February, prompted by an uncanny herd of fall painting commissions highlighting horses, I decided to steep myself in equine art imagery by day and at night by purchasing 143 episodes of Mr. Ed, a popular TV series from the 1960’s featuring a sarcastic talking horse. Half the people I told about my peculiar purchase thought I’d gone “February Cuckoo”, and the other half immediately began singing the show’s theme song: “A horse is a horse of course of course but no one can talk to a horse of course...” (none of the well-tuned knew that the “Famous Mr. Ed’s” real name was Bamboo Harvester). The show’s producer picked actor Alan Young as the horse’s side kick because “he seemed like the kind of guy a horse would talk to”. Oddly enough, besides brightening the winter evenings with gentle antique equine humor and a glimpse into midcentury American morays, the now dated episodes gave me an opportunity to study a horse’s anatomy, much like the early motion frames of Edison’s early horse film.
I’ve painted many horses over the years for publications: racers for Sports Illustrated, Marlboro riders, a Yale English department chair astride a horse as Shakespeare’s Henry V, Yeats’ poem At Galway Races, a young George Washington on horseback (in Upper Black Eddy) for Zane Gray’s George Washington Frontiersman, and many others. Washington survived enemy bullets that knocked out horses under him and hats above. He was an accomplished rider, “graceful and able to leap over great heights.” His favorite battle horse was Nelson, a brown steed named after the man who had gifted it to him. Yet most of the majestic paintings we know of Washington on horseback, actually portrayed his second favorite, Blueskin, a magnificent white horse, (closer to the color of Mr. Ed) who rarely saw battle, but whose cool marble color landed him a number of supporting actor roles in presidential portraits, most notably by the American painters Peale, Trumbull, and Sully.
Among the many portraits of Washington by artist Gilbert Stuart, only one exhibits the President with his horse, Blueskin. Unfortunately, the horse is shown from the wrong end—the rear view. Ironically, Stuart, America’s most celebrated portrait painter of early American statesmen: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, etc., was an English loyalist, moving his family to Canada from Rhode Island before sailing to England, just before the start of the Revolutionary War. The image of George Washington on our dollar bill is garnered from Stuart’s rendering. I’ve always felt that the slight lip grimace evidenced in Washington’s portrait was less from the recent primal wooden dental work and more from the fact that he was being portrayed by an American-born English loyalist!
It’s hard not to be influenced by the great horse painters throughout history when attempting my own versions: Edgar Degas’ “passionate search for movement”, Velazquez’s aristocratic rearing horses, Ruben’s shimmering-skinned representations, Remington’s gritty western stallions. It is rare to find an artist throughout history that hasn’t attempted to paint a horse. The classical equine paintings of English artists Munnings, Stubbs and Landseer have gallantly ridden the centuries with their masterful renderings of horses. Alfred Munnings, perhaps England’s finest painter of horses, grew up surrounded by the workings of a mill, bustling with horses and horse drawn carts. He lost an eye at 20 and went on to paint horses engaged in battle at the German front during WWI just hundreds of yards from the action. Although he scorned the works of modernists Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne, his bold brushwork and color selection, which he acquired as an illustrator of posters, evidence a modern graphic approach that is more reminiscent of the early modernists he deplored, than the tighter anatomical horse renderings of traditionalists like Stubbs and Landseer.
The relationship between horse and rider is an intimate one. I am astonished at how the best riders are actually quite still-gliding effortlessly, anticipating and absorbing the bouncy terrain athletically, while exhibiting a calmness in their facial countenance and body posture. I made a special note of this when painting sisters Ellie and Emily, two nationally competitive eventing riders. While their horses exposed every sweating, working muscle, pounding the soil and cutting water, the girls floated effortlessly on their backs seemingly tethered only by the loosely held reins in their hands.
When Elise’s Mom and I talked about where her daughter’s portrait would take place, she mentioned that Elise might be a little shy about having her portrait painted, and if I wouldn’t mind, “Could we include her horse Allie?” Any element that is chosen by the subject, inherently tells us more about them, so Allie became a very welcome costar. She chose Patty Miller Stables in Buckingham as the location. Getting a horse to pose is like getting a dog the size of an elephant to behave. It was crucial to select the setting prior to attempting to persuade the horse to give up grass-chewing and play along. The ambient light reflecting off the sunlit barn behind me, and onto a wooded grassy path, with speckled sunlight was a perfect location, and after trying many options of full figures, I decided to crop in on the couple, and let Elise’s pretty face share with us the joy of their relationship. She loved the portrait, and I loved her comment “Awesome, you’ve even got my watch tan in there!”
Pipersville’s Come Along Farm owner Margaret Dulaney commissioned a number of paintings for her new book, The Parables of Sunlight. “I remember the day I first saw Allie,” she recalled, “a pretty, little thoroughbred, a bay filly with a heart shaped star on her forehead. I had resisted her for months, when one night, while visiting her barn, the heart resting on her forehead came crashing through my own. I fell in love and took her on. Five years later, she was kicked by another horse out in the field. It was a possibly fatal injury. This was the beginning of the great battle for her life.”
The above mentioned British equine artist George Stubbs dissected horses with his wife to better understand their anatomy. I certainly don’t have the stomach, or wife, for that practice, and I don’t believe that the surgery is a prerequisite when painting a horse. Nor do I believe it necessary to know how to ride one to accurately depict horse and rider. In fact, I can paint a horse a lot better than I could ever ride one. The first time I rode a horse was in Manhattan in 1979. I met the tame celebrity, an elderly horse that had been in the movie Hair, at a stable on the upper West Side. I paid the deposit, was given the reigns, and was pointed toward Central Park. I couldn’t believe they had just handed me the keys and said, “Go.” I didn’t know where I was going! The lake in the park is large, made even larger by a slow horse, and assuming after an hour that I had made it completely around the lake, I exited the park to the street and began looking for the stable. Taxis were beeping, people were laughing, pointing ... they were obviously admiring my Hair horse, or so I thought. I soon realized that the sun was on the wrong side of the city, and to my horror, I had exited on the east side of the park as I continued trotting up 5th Avenue and not Central Park West. It was probably then that I reached the conclusion that I had better leave horseback riding to the professionals, that future brushes with horses would only take place on a studio canvas.
I recently sold a painting titled, Barn Horse in Vail, Colorado, to a couple visiting from Mexico. Next February, when temperatures drop off the thermometer, I’ll lift a cup of hot chocolate, down a vitamin D, turn on the UV lamp and think of him in sunny Mexico as I put on another episode of Mr. Ed.
To learn more about Glenn Harrington, go to www.GlennHarrington.com or visit https://silvermangallerybuckscountypa.com/glenn-harrington.