BAILY'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF SPORTS AND PASTIMES. MR. J. H. HOULDSWORTH. THIS gentleman, a member of the Jockey Club, and a well-known owner of horses, is of Scotch extraction. He trains at Newmarket, and has, for the last few years, pursued a rather adverse fortune, which now seems to be relenting in his favour. He is a hunting man, and fond, we believe, of most of the sports and occupations of a country gentleman. THE NOBLE ANIMAL' AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY. In a country especially priding itself upon sporting instincts, and more particularly upon those in which the noble animal' plays so conspicuous a part, it is passing strange that in these latter days no pictorial exponent of the national tastes should have been found capable of doing justice to the heroes and heroines of Turf or Chase. The mantle of Herring has found no worthy resting-place on the shoulders of any of his countrymen; and, though we have had animal painters galore, the majority of them have preferred to devote their attention to the humbler grades of the brute creation, and have approached the task of occasional delineations of the horse, if we may judge from results, with very meagre confidence in their powers of doing him justice. The great Sir Edwin himself, save and except in his picture of Shoeing the Bay Mare,' has not been happy in his endeavours to transfer to canvas the animal which England, in darker ages, would assuredly have made as important an object of worship as Egypt did of the ibis, or Rome of the wolf. And if we find the study of the horse so unaccountably neglected, or studiously avoided, among those making a spécialité of his fellows in the brute creation, it is no VOL. XXVII.-No. 185. K 2 NOBLE ANIMAL' AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY. [July, wonder that, when introduced incidentally in the paintings of artists having no sort of affinity towards him, he comes out like Mr. Weller's unicorn, or any other fabulous animal, and so grossly caricatured as to be pitched upon by the merest tyro in the art of drawing or in the knowledge of horseflesh as a palpable blot in the picture.. In fact, the horse has been like the man who fell among thieves, and has been studiously avoided by all save a few good Samaritans, who have endeavoured in vain to raise him to his proper place, as worthy of Art's highest recognition, and only failed because their powers were unequal to the task. Much of this neglect of a noble subject has arisen from the atrocious demands of fashion now in vogue of requiring a representation of the horse, the whole horse, and no'thing but the horse,' as he appears in many of our shop windows, or on smoking or billiard-room walls, through the length and breadth of England. We shall not be offending Cornhill susceptibilities by inveighing against this most barbarous and uncompromising system of treating the great winners of our day. The taste of the British public is eminently realistic in this respect, and the introduction of anything to subdue the harshness of the central figure is almost resented by their severe ideas as to how Doncaster or Prince Charlie should be posed. We never enter Harry Hall's studio at Newmarket without regretting that so much real ability and knowledge of his art, both anatomically and aesthetically, should be confined within such absurd limitations, instead of being allowed free scope to vary in the treatment of each different subject. It should be borne in mind that the portrait of a horse differs from the portrait of an individual in this important respect, that whereas, even by the aid of colour, no great amount of character can be thrown into the composition of a head; it is otherwise when the human form divine is represented, and everything else is subordinated to facial expression. No one would go to Madame Tussaud's for his model of a celebrity, except he meant to transfer it to a tailor's fashion-sheet, for the sake of the clothes. And what favour at the hands of the hanging committee would an artist be likely to find who elaborated the dress at the expense of the face, and sacrificed everything to work out the details of a morning or evening suit of clothes, surmounting his figure with the waxen mask of the barber? Yet this is in reality what is required of the horse-painter of the present day. He is called upon to represent his subject in the most unnatural of positions, and is strictly forbidden to trespass over the boundary which separates the real from the ideal. What wonder, then, that so many likenesses of the noble animal result in disappointing failures, and degenerate into mere maps of horses, bright and burnished as copper coal-scuttles, and with about as much light and expression. The almost entire absence of this painful realism is a distinguishing feature between our own and some continental schools of painting. The foreigner may be too high-flown, idealistic, and generally exaggerated in his ideas; but he is far more correct in matters of detail, and, if required tc introduce animals into his pictures, takes care that they shall be |