Pumpkin

A racehorse and a child face one another beneath spreading trees. Pumpkin occupies most of the foreground, but the small boy at the right gives his stillness a purpose. Between the horse’s lowered muzzle and the vessel in the boy’s hands, Stubbs leaves a narrow interval: the space in which the next movement might happen.

Yale’s Pumpkin with a Stable-lad is signed and dated 1774. Measuring 82.2 × 101.3 cm, it is painted in beeswax and oil on panel. The Yale Center for British Art acquired it through Paul Mellon’s 2001 bequest. ^[1]

A horse with a name and a pedigree

Pumpkin was bred by John Pratt and owned by Thomas Foley, later the second Baron Foley. Yale identifies Foley as the patron who commissioned this portrait. ^[1]

The 1793 General Stud-Book gives Pumpkin a place within a recorded family. Under the mare by Squirt, it lists a chestnut colt born in 1769, sired by Matchem, with Mr Foley opposite his name. This is a specific animal with a traceable parentage, rather than a convenient name attached to an anonymous horse. ^[15]

According to Yale’s account, Pumpkin won sixteen races from twenty-four starts, earning 6,090 guineas and nine hogsheads of claret. Many victories came at Newmarket. His first race, in 1772, reportedly ended with a half-neck defeat of the favourite, Denmark. ^[16]

No finish, galloping stride or cheering spectator interrupts this scene. The horse stands without a rider, his broad side exposed to the light. The boy faces him from ground level.

The boy and the waiting horse

The object the boy holds is a sieve used to feed his charge. Angus Trumble’s catalogue entry emphasises the child’s serious, responsible bearing. ^[1]

Stubbs places the vessel low enough for the horse to approach it, but the muzzle has not reached its rim. The boy’s arms stretch forwards while his body remains upright. Neither figure makes a large gesture. Their opposed profiles create the principal exchange, giving significance to a small change of head or hand rather than to an unfolding spectacle.

The difference in their size is impossible to overlook. Pumpkin’s body extends across the centre, and his head reaches towards a figure whose whole height scarcely exceeds the horse’s shoulder. Yet the boy is not hidden behind the animal. His position at the edge keeps his face, jacket, arms and legs available to the viewer. The painting offers two clear silhouettes connected by a practical task.

His red coat carries unusual weight within the scene. Against the subdued browns and greens of the trees, it makes the smallest principal figure immediately noticeable. The pale collar and cuffs break its surface, while the light stockings lead the eye down towards the dark shoes. These contrasts distinguish the child without giving him a commanding gesture or moving him into the centre.

Pumpkin is equally individualised through differences within a narrow range of colour. Light catches the flank, shoulder and long neck; darker passages describe the underside and the separations between the legs. The mane lies along the neck rather than flying outwards. The pale marking down the face gives the head a further point of focus as it turns towards the boy.

The arrangement encourages a sense of mutual attention, but it leaves the degree of intimacy open. The pair do not touch. The horse’s head extends into the intervening space, and the child holds his position. A viewer can attend both to the ordinary usefulness of feeding and to the unequal physical presence of the two participants.

A landscape that changes the balance

The horse and boy occupy the right-hand portion of a much larger setting. At the left, water opens a pale passage through the landscape. Distant trees appear smaller and softer than the trunks behind the figures. Above them, a broad expanse of blue sky and cloud prevents the image from becoming a tightly enclosed double portrait.

This openness matters because the figures are not symmetrically distributed. A heavy mass of foliage rises over the boy, while the horse’s body reaches away from it towards the lake. The eye can move from the red coat to the head, along the animal’s back and out towards the water. Looking back in the other direction, the branches return attention to the meeting beneath them.

A short stretch of white paling fence appears low in the middle distance. Its small, repeated uprights establish a scale beyond the horse’s legs and mark a further separation between the foreground and water. It also interrupts the broad areas of earth, foliage and reflection with something precise and constructed. The landscape contains signs of human arrangement without filling the view with buildings or crowds.

Pumpkin with a jockey

The name Pumpkin also belongs to prints with a very different arrangement. A print issued on 20 February 1794, engraved by George Townly Stubbs after his father and published through their Turf Gallery, shows the horse carrying a jockey. The example catalogued by Donald A. Heald is a stipple engraving with etching. ^[17]

In that image the horse faces left, and the mounted figure sits upright in a striped jacket. Saddle, reins and the rider’s boots make the relationship quite different from the Yale picture. The broadside presentation remains, but the animal is shown equipped to carry a professional rider. The distant landscape extends behind him; the intimate meeting with a child and a feeding vessel has disappeared.

The distinction has historical support. The Turf Gallery description reproduced by Walter Gilbey identifies the figure on Pumpkin’s back as Old South. It praises the jockey particularly in contests involving crossing and jostling. This language belongs to a competitive world, attaching the rider’s reputation to that of the horse. ^[18]

The mounted image also circulated beyond the original print. The Royal College of Surgeons records an unsigned painted copy of Pumpkin with Old South, made after the 1794 engraving. Its description identifies the striped clothing and the horse turned to the left. ^[19] The copy belongs to the afterlife of the jockey image, rather than demonstrating that the Yale boy-and-horse scene was reproduced in that form.

From the Foley collection to Paul Mellon

Yale traces the panel through the Foley family and identifies it with lot 564 in the 1919 sale at Ruxley Lodge, Surrey. ^[1]

The sale catalogue is much less specific about the horse. Its entry describes a hunter in a landscape, with a groom wearing crimson and holding a sieve. Stubbs is named as the painter, but Pumpkin is not named as the sitter. Listed among the house’s furniture, decorative objects and pictures, the work was presented through immediately recognisable features of its appearance. ^[20]

This description preserves the child’s task even as it loses the horse’s personal identity. The coat and sieve were useful identifying details in a crowded catalogue; they are also central to the encounter within the picture. The wording shows how an individual animal portrait could be handled as a more general sporting subject when it entered the market. ^[20]

Yale’s subsequent history records ownership by Daniel Haddock Carstairs in Philadelphia, a return to Knoedler on consignment, and dealings involving Carroll Carstairs and George Atwell. Knoedler sold the picture to Mellon on 1 May 1936. ^[1]

For Paul and Mary Mellon, the appeal was more personal. A passage from Mellon’s memoir, reproduced by the Frist Art Museum, recalls a hunting visit to the Cotswolds in 1936. There he met Angus Menzies, a partner in Knoedler’s London firm, who recommended a Stubbs. The couple went to see it, and Mellon remembered responding to the horse, the boy’s red jacket and the landscape. He paid $5,000 and described it as his first purchase of a painting. ^[21]

The recollection joins the two figures and their setting in a single response. Mellon did not remember only a celebrated racehorse or only a celebrated painter. The combination mattered. His enjoyment of horses and of the landscape surrounding them found an unusually direct expression in this small scene. ^[21]

In a 1992 interview, Mellon again described the 1936 purchase as something done for his own pleasure. Discussing his later collecting with Basil Taylor, he explained his wish to show a broader range of English life than the grand portraits already familiar to American audiences. He also recalled an expectation that the pictures he enjoyed privately would eventually become available to the public. ^[22]

Duncan Robinson’s recollection after Mellon’s death places Pumpkin among the sporting pictures at the Brick House in Virginia, in the collection which served as Mellon’s private picture gallery. ^[23]

Charm, responsibility and tension

The scene has not produced a single response. Reviewing the 1999 memorial exhibition of Mellon’s Stubbs collection, Roger Kimball used Pumpkin with a Stable Lad as an example of an animal seeming more individual and animated than its human companion. His broader judgement was that people in Stubbs’s animal paintings often functioned as supporting figures. ^[24]

An Evening Standard review of the Mellon exhibition at the Royal Academy placed the emphasis elsewhere. It found tension in the unequal composition, reading the boy’s position near the edge as tentative and his approach to the horse as fearful. ^[25] The same placement that makes him conspicuous can also make him look vulnerable.

These responses direct attention to different parts of the visible relationship. The horse’s size gives him pictorial authority; the child’s red coat resists his disappearance into the setting. Their nearness can suggest familiarity, while their separation keeps the encounter suspended. The painting’s interest depends partly on this openness: an ordinary act remains poised between the two figures.