Eclipse

Eclipse appears here through a print design after George Stubbs: a saddled horse, one attendant and a stable building. This single-figure composition belongs to an anonymous reduced mezzotint bearing Laurie & Whittle’s publication date of 4 June 1804. It should be distinguished from Stubbs’s paintings of the horse with two attendants or with the Wildman family. ^[1]

The chestnut stands facing right, its long body extending across almost the whole image. A pale stocking interrupts one hind leg; the other legs remain dark against the ground. The man stands close to the muzzle, his hands meeting the bridle. Behind him, a grey building and its sloping roof close the right side. A much smaller, pale stable appears at the left, beyond the horse’s tail. The dark sky gives the silhouette a strong edge, while the saddle and its rectangular cloth divide the broad surface of the back and flank. ^[2]

The surviving colour reproduction does not identify the owner or date of its impression. Nor does the plate’s 1804 imprint date every sheet printed from it: Grosvenor Prints records an example on paper watermarked 1834. Publication history and the history of an individual sheet can therefore be separated even when the pictured horse remains the same. ^{[1] [2]}

The horse behind the portraits

The General Stud Book of 1803 records Eclipse as a chestnut colt foaled in 1764, by Marske out of Spilletta. Her entry identifies Regulus as her sire and lists Eclipse alongside her other offspring, including Proserpine and Garrick. This is a breeding record organised through a mare and her progeny. It gives the horse a place in a documented family, rather than treating his appearance or reputation as sufficient evidence of ancestry. ^[16]

The horse’s name preserves a birth tradition. In its account of the family portrait, the Baltimore museum recounts that Eclipse was born on 1 April 1764 during a solar eclipse. The connection between a striking celestial event and the exceptional animal became part of the way his life was remembered. ^[17]

William, Duke of Cumberland, bred Eclipse. William Wildman subsequently owned him, followed by Denis O’Kelly, who acquired the horse in stages. Their roles matter when reading the pictures: a breeder, an owner, a groom and a jockey need not be the same person. Jim Shanahan’s Dictionary of Irish Biography describes O’Kelly as a professional gambler who became a substantial racehorse owner and breeder. His success did not secure his acceptance into the Jockey Club. The man who profited from Eclipse’s extraordinary reputation remained socially contentious within the sport that celebrated the horse. ^[18]

Shanahan also gives Charlotte Hayes a place in this history, suggesting that she may initially have helped finance O’Kelly’s gambling career. Their relationship began while they were imprisoned in the Fleet and continued after their release in 1760. She was widely known as Mrs O’Kelly, although the biographer finds no conclusive evidence that they married. ^[18]

Eclipse’s racing career belonged to a demanding system of heats. Michael Church describes his debut at Epsom on 3 May 1769 as a contest over four-mile heats, with thirty minutes between them for rubbing down. Winning one heat did not necessarily win the plate: a horse had to win two. A competitor finishing 240 yards behind a heat winner was eliminated as distanced. The familiar story of O’Kelly predicting “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere” makes sense within those rules. In the tradition Church recounts, the wager concerned Eclipse leaving every other runner outside the qualifying distance. It was a claim about the whole field, rather than simply a prediction of first place. ^[19]

Church’s account records eighteen victories, including eleven King’s Plates, across the 1769 and 1770 seasons. Some were walkovers, where no opponent contested the prize. That record combines successful competition with the deterrent effect of a horse whose superiority made challenging him unattractive. The broader world of Georgian racehorse ownership and racing helps explain why a standing portrait could carry such a formidable competitive reputation. ^[19]

A near-contemporary account also preserves the geographical extent of that reputation. In his Sporting Dictionary of 1803, William Taplin lists prizes at Epsom, Ascot, Winchester, Salisbury, Canterbury, Lewes and Lichfield, followed by successes at Newmarket, Guildford, Nottingham, York and Lincoln. His entry then moves from the racecourse to stud, first at Epsom and later at Cannons in Middlesex. The sequence shows how the horse’s value continued after racing ended. Taplin’s long list of offspring turns the record of one competitor into the beginning of many other horses’ histories. Taplin directs readers to Weatherby’s Stud Book and Racing Calendar for fuller records of Eclipse’s progeny, connecting his compact biography with the expanding literature of breeding. ^[20]

O’Kelly’s breeding establishment produced further winners. Shanahan records Young Eclipse’s Derby victory in 1781 and Serjeant’s in 1784, and distinguishes Denis from his nephew Andrew, who succeeded to his interests. ^[18]

One horse, several painted settings

David Pullins discusses Stubbs’s highly finished oil study of Eclipse against an undeveloped ground, now associated with the Royal Veterinary College. He relates it to the horse’s reuse in the Wildman family portrait. He also identifies Benjamin Green’s separate 1772 print, which retained Eclipse and John Wildman while changing the surrounding landscape. A recognisable animal could thus move between compositions without making those compositions identical. ^[21]

Baltimore’s Eclipse with Mr. Wildman and His Sons is a separate oil painting, dated about 1769–1771. The museum gives its dimensions as 101.6 × 127.1 centimetres and its accession number as 1956.282. The title identifies a family group, rather than an anonymous stable attendant. The museum’s provenance begins with descent in the Wildman family and later includes the collector Walter Gilbey. William Woodward purchased it in 1929; it entered the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the Woodward Collection in 1956. Its history therefore connects the eighteenth-century owner’s family with later collectors of sporting art. ^[17]

The signed canvas dated 1770, catalogued by Christie’s, measures 102.1 × 127.6 centimetres. The auction house identifies Denis O’Kelly as its commissioner and traces its descent to Andrew O’Kelly. ^[22]

In that painting, the horse occupies the lower part of a much taller field of sky. Its head is close to the man in a blue coat, who holds the bridle; a second man, dressed in scarlet, approaches from the right. The horse’s back, the saddle and the man’s hands form a nearly continuous horizontal passage. Against it, the two human bodies introduce small changes of direction. The blue-coated figure inclines towards the animal, while the scarlet figure steps forward with one arm extended. The encounter is organised around practical contact: reins, muzzle, hand, saddle and the approach of a rider. ^[22]

The large roof rises behind the men like a second, much steeper back. Its diagonal cuts into the bright clouds, whereas the horse’s outline runs across a quieter, lower part of the sky. Below, the legs divide the open ground into uneven intervals. One hind leg is pale near the hoof; the chestnut coat lightens across the shoulder and rounded hindquarters. The long tail hangs towards the left. Nothing in this arrangement resembles the compressed finish of a race. The animal is presented close enough for its shape and the relations around it to be examined at leisure. ^[22]

Christie’s associates the setting with Newmarket’s rubbing house and proposes Samuel Merriott as the scarlet-clad jockey. The identification remains qualified. The Jockey Club owns another version: Christie’s proposes an early-1790s date for it, although it has often been dated 1770. The two canvases should remain distinct. ^[22]

Comparing the 1770 painting with the single-attendant print makes the change particularly clear. The print’s man fills the narrow space between muzzle and building; the approaching scarlet figure has disappeared. The stable at the left is more conspicuous, and the sky is markedly darker. The horse still supplies the composition’s long horizontal centre, but the human action has contracted into one exchange at its head. Colour also changes the balance: the maroon coat in the reproduction gathers the human presence into a single dark mass. These visible differences prevent the print from serving as an exact substitute for the two-figure painting. ^{[2] [22]}

Eclipse in the print trade

Thomas Burke’s mezzotint was first published in 1772. Later states and reissues require their own dates: George Glazer Gallery catalogues a colour impression with a Richard H. Laurie imprint as a fourth state. A later publisher’s name does not turn the underlying design into a new Stubbs painting. ^{[22] [23]}

The family’s later Turf Gallery project gave famous racehorses another setting for circulation. The National Gallery describes an undertaking begun around 1790 to chronicle fifty years of racing history through horse portraits. Sixteen paintings were completed and exhibited in Conduit Street in 1794. Prints after the pictures, engraved by Stubbs’s son, were produced in two sizes. The project lost its promised financial support, but its ambition is revealing: horses were assembled into a historical sequence and made available as reproducible images. Eclipse could be remembered alongside other celebrated racers through a coordinated publication, rather than only through a painting commissioned by one owner. ^[24]

Grosvenor Prints records George Townley Stubbs’s Eclipse stipple with an imprint of 1 September 1796 from the Turf Gallery. Its catalogue identifies a two-figure composition. This is another distinct publication, rather than the anonymous single-attendant mezzotint illustrated here. ^[25]

Charles Hunt’s aquatint of 1839 provides a further example of the image’s continued life. Yale records Hunt as the printmaker after Stubbs and identifies an impression with a J. Moore publication line dated 12 November 1839. Its materials include aquatint with watercolour and gouache on wove paper; a Whatman 1839 watermark supplies evidence about that particular sheet. It belongs to the Paul Mellon Collection, accession B1985.36.1057. The named engraver, printing process, publisher and paper distinguish it from both an eighteenth-century canvas and the Laurie & Whittle reduced print. ^[26]

The print also carries a long inscription describing pedigree and racing performances. Image and lettering offer complementary ways of identifying its subject: the horse can be recognised by a pictorial likeness and read about through a condensed career. The complete printed object asks its viewer to read as well as look. ^[26]

Hunt’s image also rearranges the setting. The horse faces right, but a substantial building stands behind its hindquarters on the left. The attendant is farther to the right, beyond the horse’s head, with more open ground between him and the animal. His dark stockings contrast with the white ones in the single-attendant reproduction shown here. The broad likeness of a saddled chestnut is maintained while the framing architecture and human spacing change. The altered spacing gives horse and handler more independent outlines within the landscape. ^[26]

Racing records and breeding science

The history of the records is part of the story. Weatherbys dates James Weatherby’s appointment as the Jockey Club’s secretary and keeper of the Match Book to 1770. It identifies 1773 as the year of his first Racing Calendar and 1791 as the first General Stud Book. These publications served different purposes: recording sporting events and establishing pedigrees were related activities, but a race result and a breeding entry were different kinds of evidence. Eclipse’s history passes through both. Their growth made it possible to connect seasonal performances with relationships extending across generations. ^[27]

Modern genetics has examined the reach of Eclipse’s paternal line. In a 2013 study, Barbara Wallner and her colleagues screened 615 male horses from predominantly European breeds and combined Y-chromosome evidence with pedigrees. They associated a prominent haplotype with the line descending through Eclipse, locating its origin in him or one of the following two generations. In their sample, that haplotype occurred in 96.5 per cent of the Thoroughbreds. The result concerns a particular paternal marker in a defined sample. It does not mean that nearly all the horses’ genes came from Eclipse, or establish a single genetic explanation for his racing ability. The authors also acknowledged the limits of their geographical and breed sampling. Their finding gives the horse’s later influence a more precise meaning than a vague assertion that almost every modern racehorse descends from him. ^[28]

A body measured after a racing career

Eclipse also became an object of anatomical investigation. Charles Vial de Sainbel’s Essay on the Proportions of Eclipse, published in a second edition in 1795, describes measurements made while the horse was alive and examination after dissection. Sainbel sought mechanical explanations of movement, relating parts through a common measure based on divisions of the head. He reported a fourteen-pound heart. Yet his account also contains important limits: Eclipse’s greater bulk in old age affected measurements, founder had distorted his fore feet, and an engraver had made the body in one plate two inches too short. His geometrical reconstruction should be read as an eighteenth-century investigation with stated imperfections, rather than as a modern measurement of the horse’s maximum speed. ^[29]

Even the date of death differs between early records. Sainbel places it on 27 February 1789; the General Stud Book’s 1803 list gives 26 February. Both identify the same famous horse, but their disagreement cautions against making every later caption appear more exact than the evidence it inherits. ^{[16] [29]}

The Royal Veterinary College places the examination of Eclipse within the circumstances surrounding its foundation. Sainbel was seeking support for veterinary education, with backing from the Odiham Agricultural Society and a London committee. The college was established in 1791, and its first students began in 1792. Eclipse’s celebrated body helped make the need for animal knowledge visible, although the institution’s history also involved sustained organisation, patrons and teaching. This is a different connection between art and anatomy from Stubbs’s earlier work for The Anatomy of the Horse: Eclipse’s dissection should not be attributed to the painter. ^{[24] [30]}

A modern study returned to the question of the skeleton’s identity. In 2012, Mim Bower and her co-authors reported a combination of mitochondrial DNA comparisons, skeletal measurements, contemporary autopsy measurements, and carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis. Their published abstract describes the evidence as consistent with the putative skeleton being Eclipse’s, and the isotope work addressed whether its bones came from one horse. Several kinds of comparison contributed to the result, bringing the remains into a new relationship with the written measurements made after the horse’s death. ^[31]

The connection acquired a particularly direct exhibition form at the Mauritshuis. Its announcement for the 2020 Stubbs exhibition described the display of Eclipse’s skeleton beside a rare oil sketch made early in the horse’s career. The pairing brought two surviving kinds of evidence into the same space: the animal’s remains and a painter’s representation of its outward form. The museum framed the exhibition through Stubbs’s close study of nature, giving the racehorse a place in the history of looking as well as in the history of breeding and competition. ^[32]

Copies, fragments and a moving reconstruction

The image has also entered modern art. Giulio Paolini’s Eclipse (painted by George Stubbs), dated 1986, combines a framed colour photograph of a lithographic reproduction with fragments of a plaster horse cast and a Plexiglas sheet. The artist’s foundation records six numbered examples. It identifies the pictured source as the Jockey Club’s Eclipse composition and the cast’s model as Gaetano Monti’s Cavallo arabo of 1819. This work brings different objects and generations of reproduction together. The foundation describes a play of copies in which the model is eclipsed and fragmented. The earlier equine portrait becomes material for a work concerned with copies, models and the dissolution of an image. ^[33]

A recent digital project approaches the surviving evidence in another way. Creature Pipeline describes its reanimation of Eclipse as a combination of scans of the skeleton, reference paintings by Stubbs and motion-capture data obtained from modern horses on a treadmill. The same project presents a prototype anatomy game in which a virtual skeleton can be assembled bone by bone. The result is a constructed moving interpretation, drawing different sources together; it cannot be an observation of Eclipse’s own recorded movement. Stubbs’s portraits nevertheless remain useful visual references within that reconstruction. Their afterlife extends from engraved sheets to a digital body that can be put into motion and taken apart for study. ^[34]