Baronet

The horse stretches almost the full width of the picture, its forelegs reaching towards the left while its hindlegs trail behind. Above this long, low body, the jockey sits conspicuously upright. His hands reach forward, yet his shoulders remain back; his face turns towards us while the horse continues across the grass. The difference between their postures makes the painting arresting. ^[1] Baronet supplies the extended movement, and Sam Chifney presents an appearance of restraint within it.

George Stubbs's Baronet with Sam Chifney Up, painted in 1791, brings a named racehorse and a recognisable professional rider into one portrait. The Huntington connects the subject with Baronet's victory in the Oatlands Stakes that year and identifies the painting as the first made for Stubbs's proposed Turf Review. ^[2] Those associations open several ways of looking: through the animal's recorded identity, through Chifney's account of his work, and through the attempt to turn sporting portraits into a published history.

Which painting is this?

The Huntington canvas measures 95.9 by 127 centimetres and is painted in oil. Its accession number is 58.8; the collection credits the gift of Dr Charles H. Strub. ^[2] These details identify the particular object discussed here. They also distinguish it from a second 1791 painting in the Royal Collection, and from the later print carrying the shorter title Baronet.

The title names both participants. Baronet is the horse; Sam is the familiar form of Samuel Chifney, the elder jockey, whose dates the Huntington gives as 1753–1807. ^[2] The word “up” identifies him as mounted. It is a compact sporting title, but it makes the man's presence essential. He is neither an anonymous measure of the animal's size nor an owner posing beside a possession. The picture gives us a horse in motion with the professional who rode him.

The distinction between owner and commissioner also matters. Baronet belonged to the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, at the time of his famous victory. ^[2] That relationship does not establish who commissioned this particular canvas, how much it cost or where it first hung. The Huntington's public entry supplies the modern gift credit without an earlier chain of ownership. The horse's royal connection therefore cannot fill the gaps in the painting's provenance.

A useful way into the wider paintings of George Stubbs is to recognise how much can change around a repeated subject. The same named animal might appear in more than one canvas, then acquire another public life on paper. Here, measurements and collection names help us keep those histories attached to the right objects while we follow the design between them.

Baronet before the portrait

Baronet's identity can be checked against a printed record quite unlike the painting. In the 1803 General Stud-Book, he appears among the offspring of Penultima: a bay colt foaled in 1785, by Vertumnus. Penultima was by Snap; her own entry records that she was bred by Mr Dutton and foaled in 1777. Baronet's line is associated with Sir W. Vavasour, alongside the following year's Brickdust Nan. ^[16]

The arrangement is worth understanding. The mare heads the entry, and successive offspring follow beneath her. Reading down the page locates Baronet within a maternal history rather than isolating him as a celebrated winner. His name, year, colour and sire distinguish him from other horses called Baronet. The painter's individual likeness and the compiler's compact notation identify the animal in different ways: one through appearance, the other through descent and recorded association.

Vavasour's name should not be made to answer every question about breeding. The explicit “bred by” statement at the top concerns Penultima. Later accounts differ over whether Baronet himself was bred by Lord Sherborne or Sir Walter Vavasour; the stud-book entry does not expressly settle that dispute. A secure pedigree is possible without choosing a breeder on insufficient evidence.

A contemporary notice explains Baronet's ownership and name. In its 1794 description of the Turf Gallery, the Sporting Magazine says that the Prince bought Baronet from Sir Walter Vavasour, a baronet, and links the horse's naming to that circumstance. ^[17] This is an early published explanation, rather than a sale document. It gives neither a purchase price nor precise transfer terms, and it cannot establish a commission for the Huntington picture.

What these records offer is a more exact horse than the generic champion suggested by an isolated galloping silhouette. Baronet had a recorded birth, parentage and association with an earlier owner before he became the Prince's successful runner. Those facts do not explain the painted muscles or predict the result of a race. They locate the animal whose body Stubbs has made so emphatic. The long neck, deep barrel and extended legs belong within an individual portrait, not an illustration of an abstract ideal of speed.

The choice before the race

The Oatlands contest took place at Ascot in June 1791. The British Champions Series Hall of Fame describes a handicap field of nineteen, with weights allocated according to form to give the runners a theoretically equal chance. Baronet carried 8 stone 4 pounds and won at odds of 20–1. ^[18] A handicap weight is a condition of competition, not a measurement of the horse's size; the odds describe the betting assessment, not an anatomical quality visible in the portrait.

Chifney's Genius Genuine gives a personal account. At Epsom on 21 June 1791, a two-mile trial at the forthcoming weights saw Escape, carrying 9 stone 10 pounds, beat Baronet by about a neck. Chifney says he later judged Escape unfit and Baronet ready, and chose Baronet when the Prince allowed him to decide. The race followed on Tuesday, 28 June. ^[19]

This account makes selection part of the rider's work. The trial result alone did not determine his choice: it had to be interpreted alongside the horses' subsequent condition. We need not accept every judgement in Chifney's retrospective narrative to understand the problem he describes. Comparing performance under specified weights was one task; deciding which animal could reproduce that performance days later was another. Neither task appears directly in the painting's empty foreground.

With nearly half a mile remaining, Chifney recalls, Baronet was about four lengths behind the leaders by choice. He describes a hard contest with Express until the closing yards. ^[19] That tactical account does not supply an exact winning margin.

The documentary race and the painted action should nevertheless remain apart. Nothing in the canvas identifies the precise point when Baronet left his waiting position, drew level with Express or crossed a finishing line. The other eighteen starters have disappeared. The picture lets us examine one partnership at leisure; the race narrative describes decisions made among moving competitors. Bringing the two together gives the pose historical meaning without turning the canvas into an eyewitness report of the finish.

The broader account of Stubbs's racehorses and Georgian racing considers the institutions and records surrounding such performances. For Baronet, the essential point is more concentrated: a remembered victory gives the portrait its association, while the selected bodily relationship gives it its particular form.

A rider whose restraint mattered

Chifney was already a prominent jockey. The Hall of Fame records his 1789 Derby victory on Skyscraper, four Oaks wins and his appointment as the Prince of Wales's rider in 1790. It also distinguishes his successful jockey son, Sam Chifney Junior, from the elder man. ^[20] That professional context prevents the figure in Stubbs's painting from becoming a picturesque accessory. His name carried a reputation before viewers considered the horse beneath him.

In Genius Genuine, Chifney says his reins appeared loose while allowing proper liberty. He advocates a light mouth, limbs beneath the body and less wasted exertion, then fine adjustments at the finish and gradual easing. ^[19] The apparent relaxation concealed a claim to precise control.

The consulted 1804 edition presents professional knowledge as something Chifney could explain to those who misunderstood him. It is a defence, rather than an impartial assessment. The later Escape dispute helps explain its purpose without becoming Baronet's story. ^{[19] [20]}

Stubbs's painted reins are visible connections between mouth and hands. They do not look like a rigid bar, nor do they dissolve into an absence of control. Their relatively fine lines have to be followed across the horse's darker neck and the lighter sky beyond. The viewer discovers an active relation that is less immediately conspicuous than the animal's outstretched limbs. That contrast is central to the painting's effect: large bodily movement is accompanied by small, carefully placed human gestures.

The upright torso also complicates a simple reading of speed. Chifney does not echo the horse's length by flattening himself along its neck. His body introduces a vertical accent near the centre, giving the eye a place to settle while the legs carry it sideways. His arms form a descending link towards the reins, and his booted leg drops against the horse's side. Horse and rider remain distinct shapes, joined at several points rather than merged into a single rushing outline.

This is an interpretation of the visible arrangement, not proof that Stubbs painted a complete riding system. A picture cannot show changes of pressure through an entire race, the horse's response over successive strides or the rider's judgement of fatigue. What it can make legible is a relation of posture and contact. Chifney's text gives us reasons to attend to that relation, while the painting gives it a sustained visual presence unavailable in a written result.

Looking at speed

Baronet's silhouette is remarkably clear. The head projects to the left, the back runs beneath the rider, and the dark tail extends above the hindquarters towards the right. Below, the forelegs and hindlegs spread into two separated pairs. All four hooves clear the ground. The body seems carried across the foreground rather than planted upon it, yet the strongly modelled barrel gives the airborne animal considerable weight.

The black lower legs sharpen this impression. They become narrow dark strokes against the more muted grass, making the forward reach and backward extension easy to distinguish. Near the shoulder and thigh, those strokes broaden into the red-brown masses of the body. The transition from slender extremities to substantial muscles produces much of the animal's visual force. Stubbs does not need a rival horse to establish that force; the arrangement of one body is sufficient.

The head and neck form another long movement. The neck slopes forward from the withers, bringing the muzzle well ahead of the chest. The small ear tips interrupt its upper contour, while the bridle adds finer lines around the face. There is enough definition to hold the animal's identity within the large sweep of the composition. Calling the horse proud, confident or triumphant would add a state of mind that the visible forms cannot establish.

Light works across the coat in broad, curved passages. The shoulder, barrel and hindquarters emerge through differences of red-brown tone, while the underside is darker. These transitions give the body volume without breaking its continuity into a diagram of separate parts. We can follow the surface from neck to flank and still read the animal as one moving form. The painting's anatomical interest lies as much in those connections as in the visibility of individual muscles.

Chifney's colour is more sharply divided. Red sleeves lead the eye towards his hands; a dark blue torso holds the middle of the figure; pale breeches separate his leg from the horse's coat. His cap and boots provide smaller dark endpoints. Beneath him, the saddlecloth and pale girth add compact areas of colour and vertical line. Tack, clothing and body remain distinguishable even where they overlap. There is no raised whip directing our attention above the rider: the emphatic action is in the horse's body, while the hands remain collected in front of the jockey. ^{[2] [1]}

His turned face creates a second direction within the picture. The horse continues left while the rider addresses the space in front of the canvas. That does not establish what he felt or whether he was acknowledging a particular spectator. It gives the human figure a portrait presence of its own. We are offered both the working posture of a jockey and a face that can be looked at, rather than only a rearward glimpse of a man racing away.

The gallop is therefore doing several jobs at once. It signals rapid movement, stretches the horse across the available width and creates a broad platform for the much smaller upright sitter. We can appreciate that pictorial economy without insisting that the pose records a fraction of a second exactly as a camera would. The arrangement has to sustain recognition and movement together. Its success can be judged through the painting before any attempt to reconstruct a stride mechanically.

A landscape with room to move

The setting gives the outstretched horse an unusually large breathing space. Much of the canvas is sky. The ground rises only far enough to place the animal against an open horizon, leaving the rider's head and upper body clearly outlined. The sky's cooler blue area towards the left meets a larger mass of grey and warmer cloud towards the right. Those changes create atmosphere without identifying the weather on race day.

At the left, the substantial building supplies a different kind of shape. Its roof slopes steeply, its windows form a dark horizontal band, and rails extend across the ground nearby. The solidity of that structure contrasts with the suspended horse. Baronet's muzzle approaches the building's edge, but his body occupies the open ground beyond it; the architecture marks a place through which movement can be imagined.

A much smaller building appears in the distance at the right. The difference in scale helps establish depth without a crowd of figures or an elaborate chain of foreground details. The eye can travel from the large structure across the horse to that remote accent. Meanwhile, the horse's body holds the immediate space. Landscape here is sufficiently articulated to prevent the figure from floating in an empty field of colour, but restrained enough to preserve its dominance.

The temptation is to identify every feature as an exact part of a famous racecourse. The Royal Collection's description of its own version identifies a Newmarket rubbing house. ^[21] That label belongs to that painting's documented description. It should not be transferred automatically to the Huntington canvas, or used to move the Oatlands race from Ascot to Newmarket. A portrait associated with a victory and a view documenting the race's actual location are different kinds of image.

The absence of spectators is also consequential. Without a ring of faces, the viewer has no painted audience to join. Without Express or a line of following runners, there is no visible contest to resolve. Attention returns to the points of contact between horse and rider, the arrangement of limbs and the relation of the moving figure to the fixed building. The painting has extracted a recognisable partnership from the confusion of an event.

Two canvases and one design

The Royal Collection painting is titled Baronet with Samuel Chifney up, bears the date 1791 and measures 102.1 by 127.8 centimetres. Its accession is RCIN 400587. The Royal Collection's image partner also identifies the blue, red and gold royal colours and the Newmarket building for that version. ^[21] Its canvas is taller than the Huntington's, although their widths are close.

Those measurements establish a distinction even before a viewer compares reproductions. They do not establish which picture came first, how the work was divided in the studio or whether the two arose from one commission. Nor can the royal ownership history of RCIN 400587 be inserted into the gaps before the Huntington's Strub gift.

The distinction changes the use of the word “original”. It may refer loosely to Stubbs's painted design as opposed to a later engraving, but that usage does not decide the order of two surviving canvases. A print can transmit a composition without resolving every question about the paintings associated with it. For this reason, the Huntington picture is best identified by its collection and accession whenever precise object history is at issue.

There is a dated public witness to its later museum setting. The Huntington's 2018 Zebra exhibition notice directed visitors to Baronet with Sam Chifney Up on the first floor of the Huntington Art Gallery as part of the permanent collection. ^[22] That locates it within a particular presentation of Stubbs to museum visitors. It is historical display evidence, rather than a promise about its position or availability today.

Painting for a public history

The project behind the picture aimed to give individual racehorse portraits a much wider setting. John Hayes's National Gallery of Art biography dates the Turf Review commission to 1790 and explains that the paintings were intended for engraving by Stubbs's son. Sixteen were exhibited in 1794; none sold, and the enterprise lapsed. ^[23] The Huntington places its Baronet painting at the beginning of that undertaking. ^[2]

The contemporary prospectus, reproduced in the Sporting Magazine, makes the ambition concrete. It proposed performances, pedigrees and racing anecdotes from 1750 onwards, with more than 145 illustrated subjects in forty instalments, or at most forty-five. Each number would include three large prints, three smaller versions and letterpress. The price was two guineas per number, including gallery admission; the notice also records an option to buy individual prints. ^[17]

For Baronet, that plan matters more than the imposing intended total. The painting was to contribute to a sequence in which the reader could move between an image, a pedigree and an account of performance. The horse's appearance would become part of an organised sporting memory. Chifney's inclusion made riding skill visible within that memory, while the written matter could supply information that the picture could not contain.

The two print sizes also imply different encounters with the same subject. A large impression could be looked at independently, with horse and rider commanding a substantial sheet. A smaller version could accompany the reading of a history. We need not assume how every purchaser used a print to recognise that the publishers offered more than one relationship between image and text. Baronet could be collected as an admired subject while also belonging to an intended historical series.

The unrealised scale and the surviving work should remain separate. The prospectus describes what the publishers hoped to deliver; the exhibited sixteen pictures describe what had reached the gallery at that stage. The lapse of the enterprise does not make the proposal fictitious, and the existence of prints does not prove the full programme was completed. The biography of George Stubbs places this demanding venture within his later career.

The image on paper

One exact surviving object makes the transition tangible. Yale's Baronet, accession B1985.36.1052, dates from 1794 and is catalogued as etching and stipple engraving on cream wove paper. Its sheet measures 47 by 62.2 centimetres. Yale identifies George Townley Stubbs as the printmaker; the inscription names George Stubbs as painter and dates publication by Messrs Stubbs at the Turf Gallery, Conduit Street, to 20 February 1794. ^[24]

The print preserves the leftward movement and the essential relation of horse, rider, buildings and sky. It is therefore useful for comparison with the painting's design, but it brings another surface and another vocabulary of marks. The brown coat becomes a range of grey tones. Lines and closely distributed dots describe rounded flesh, dark clothing and the atmosphere beyond the figures. A coloured passage in the painting has to remain intelligible after colour has ceased to do that work.

The lower margin changes the encounter further. The painted scene gives way to the horse's title, the makers' names and a publication statement. These words are outside the represented ground, yet they identify the image for its purchaser. The division between painter and engraver is made explicit: one supplied the painted invention, the other translated it for printing. The name Baronet is no longer dependent upon a viewer recognising the horse from appearance alone.

Looking between the two images also shows why the print should not be treated as a transparent substitute for the canvas. Contrast, texture and the clarity of individual details affect how the figure is read. The impression can make the separation of tack, coat and clothing especially insistent, while the painting offers the relationship of their colours. Each object rewards looking on its own terms, even where the composition remains recognisable.

The wider histories of Stubbs's prints and his technique, enamel and printmaking explain the processes and collaborations in greater detail. Here the surviving Yale sheet establishes something precise: the Baronet design entered the reproducible form envisaged by the racing-history project.

What the first reviewers saw

The 1794 Sporting Magazine notice lists Baronet as number XII in its account of the exhibited paintings. It praises Stubbs's attention to Chifney's riding style and singles out the horse's four limbs clear of the ground as an ambitious achievement. ^[17] This is contemporary reception of the displayed subject, not documentary proof that the reviewer stood before the canvas now numbered 58.8.

The emphasis is revealing. The reviewer connects the rider's professional identity with the artist's difficult representation of movement. The image was being considered as a portrayal of both a celebrated jockey and the animal on which he had won credit. The airborne pose attracted notice in its own right; it was not merely an incidental convention that every observer passed over without comment.

The notice's enthusiasm also needs to remain an opinion. Its claim for Stubbs's exceptional achievement cannot serve as a comprehensive history of earlier galloping horses, nor does praise settle the mechanics of locomotion. What survives is evidence of what one contemporary response valued: recognisable riding style, equine exertion and the painter's ability to hold both in a single striking image.

That response returns us to the canvas's central relation. Baronet's spread limbs make speed immediately visible; Chifney's upright seat and contained hands make the means of riding less obvious. Once we attend to both, the picture becomes more than the likeness of a winner. It gives a durable form to a collaboration that a race result can name but cannot show. Within the larger work of George Stubbs, this particular partnership joins animal portraiture, professional skill and the ambition to make sporting experience available to a public beyond the course.