SS - if you can find WHISTLEJACKET, please, and put that one up, some people might appreciate the man more. It's a ginormous canvas, too, overpowering in some respects, but really stunning. He spent a very long time with knackermen, taking up some of the butchering work himself, in order to understand the underpinnings of horses, such as the skeleton, noting where tendons were attached and how muscle groups worked. His brushwork is beautiful and his landscapes in works like Mares and Foals In A Landscape are sensitive and very 'English'. The colour shadings and the overall palette of his works tends to be restrained but still truthful, and he made as much of humble grooms and riders in the pictures as their grand patrons - in fact, in many cases he made them more centre-stage.
Munnings's horse work is somewhat more expressionist and his big skies of Newmarket, etc. add a great deal of atmosphere to even ordinary working strings in the early morning.
John Skeaping was another equine artist fascinated by the representation of racing speed in his pared-down, no-nonsense approach. One of his featuring Lester in a driving finish is all streamlined speed. Very clever to capture the essence of physical effort without some of the more hyped-up eyeball-popping, vein-straining works by other artists.
