Racehorses at Goodwood

George Stubbs painted Racehorses Exercising at Goodwood in 1759–60 for the 3rd Duke of Richmond. The oil painting, measuring 127.5 × 204 cm, remains in the Goodwood Collection at Goodwood House, West Sussex. ^[1]

Three horses in bright yellow coverings carry yellow-coated riders towards the left, while a mounted party watches from the centre and a grey horse receives attention beside a building at the right. Across this broad field, movement, observation and manual work have their own spaces. Stubbs brings them together without making every figure perform the same action or look in the same direction. ^[2]

Three activities in one landscape

The exercising horses occupy an unusually open part of the picture. Their bodies are separated against green ground, with enough space between them to follow each outline. They diminish towards the upper left, creating a diagonal that carries the eye away from the foreground. The nearest horse is the largest and lowest of the three; its extended body gives the procession an immediate forward thrust. ^[2]

Yellow cloth covers the horses’ heads, necks and backs, so their appearance differs markedly from that of the dark, uncovered mounts at the centre. The projecting ears and muzzles remain distinct, and bare legs emerge below the coverings. Red edging follows the cloths’ contours. The repetition makes the three animals recognisable as a group before the viewer has examined their different coats or positions. ^[2]

Each rider sits above this yellow mass in a coat of much the same colour, topped by a dark hat. The riders’ hands and reins connect them to the horses’ covered heads. Although the group progresses in one direction, the intervals between the bodies prevent it from becoming a single indistinct band. Small dark dogs below and behind the horses introduce a much lower, less regular pattern of movement. ^[2]

The central riders interrupt that diagonal. Here, upright figures and overlapping dark horses form a compact group. One man extends his arm towards the exercising animals, giving the spectators a visible connection with the action at the left. Beside him a woman sits prominently against the distant landscape; another mounted woman occupies a position farther to the right. Their arrangement leaves the running horses clearly visible. ^[2]

At the right, the grey turns the picture towards a different kind of activity. Its light body stands out against the darker trees and building. A yellow-coated attendant holds it near the head, while a crouching worker attends to its underside. Another figure carries a great bundle of straw. The exercise ground and this little workplace share the same foreground, with no fence dividing their functions. Behind the grey, another man and a dark horse emerge from the hedge, linking the spectators’ group with the working corner. ^[2]

The groups spread across the breadth of the canvas, each with its own centre of attention. The eye can follow the exercising line, pause among the mounted spectators, then investigate the hands, legs and straw surrounding the grey. Even where bodies overlap, their heads and contrasting positions help keep their roles legible. ^{[1] [2]}

The Duchess, Lady George and the steward

Goodwood identifies Mary, Duchess of Richmond, riding side-saddle, with her sister-in-law Lady George Lennox nearby. The pointing man is probably the estate steward Richard Buckner; some grooms may be members of Charlton’s Budd family. ^[1]

Lady George was Louisa Ker, also spelt Kerr. She appears under that name in a Ramsay study in the National Galleries of Scotland, while a portrait print at the Rijksmuseum calls her Lady George Lennox. Both names belong to the same woman. ^[15]

The Met’s 1984 book Man and the Horse instead calls the observing man the Duke. ^[16]

The visual distinctions between these people are precise without requiring a complete list of names. The women’s long dark skirts hang against their horses’ flanks, whereas the exercising riders’ yellow coats extend behind their saddles. The pointing man’s green coat carries conspicuous lines of pale ornament down its front. Black hats recur across the groups, but the larger areas of yellow, green and black make different figures easy to follow. ^[2]

There is also a difference in how bodies occupy the scene. The mounted observers sit above the dogs and attendants, their dark horses forming a relatively still centre. At the right, work brings a man close to the ground beneath the grey’s belly. His bent posture contrasts with the vertical position of the attendant holding its head. These relationships give the picture a social structure through visible tasks and positions. ^[2]

Goodwood calls the yellow and scarlet ducal livery, identifying household service, and the dogs Sussex spaniels. It suggests these may include the two spaniels taken on Richmond’s 1755 Grand Tour, an intriguing but tentative identification. ^[1]

Why the racehorses wear blankets

The coverings have a practical purpose as well as a striking appearance. Man and the Horse explains that the heavy blankets and hoods encouraged sweating, understood as a means of reducing surplus weight. The horses are being prepared through exercise, rather than competing for a finishing post. Their yellow equipment belongs to the training process represented here. ^[16]

A later primary account makes the relationship between clothing and labour especially clear. In his Sporting Dictionary of 1803, William Taplin describes trainers loading horses with sheets and other coverings before a sweating gallop. He says they believed the practice maintained breathing capacity and prevented excessive flesh. The quantity of clothing and the distance varied with the horse’s condition and the race for which it was being trained. ^[17]

Taplin follows the horse beyond the gallop. After walking it briefly, attendants removed its coverings, scraped away perspiration and then used straw or hay to rub it down. Dry sheets and a hood followed, before the return to the stable for further dressing, water, food and rest. His sequence helps explain why exercise and rubbing down belong together in a sporting picture. The worker’s job continued after the conspicuous movement across open ground had ended. ^[17]

Stubbs makes the materials of that work conspicuous. The bundle beside the building is almost as broad as the small figure carrying it. Loose straw lies beneath the grey, picking up the warm colour of the attendants’ coats. Its rough, spreading form contrasts with the horse’s smooth outline and the taut curves of the reins. The grey lifts one foreleg while the figures work around it, introducing a small movement within the otherwise closely gathered group. ^[2]

The crouching man is particularly important to the scene’s clarity. His striped upper garment differs from the yellow coats around him, and his head and shoulders fit into the space below the horse. He could easily disappear in such a crowded passage, but the change of colour and the angle of his back make his action readable. The picture gives time and space to an activity that would vanish from a portrait concerned only with a winning horse. ^[2]

Movement itself involves a historical convention. The Met catalogue points to the extended, airborne gallop used in sporting art before Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic investigations. The painted pose communicates speed through a familiar visual formula, alongside the bodily understanding that came from Stubbs’s anatomical work. ^[16]

A park opening towards the sea

The ground behind the horses is remarkably spacious. A low wooded rise stretches across the distance, with a pale band beyond it. Small white buildings and areas of water appear between scattered trees. These details are much smaller and lighter than the foreground figures, so the view recedes gradually without needing a wall or road to mark the distance. The horses remain clear against this landscape, rather than being swallowed by it. ^[2]

Goodwood identifies Chichester Cathedral’s spire in the distance and the Isle of Wight beyond. ^[1]

This outward prospect fits the estate’s position between the South Downs and the coastal plain. Historic England describes a landscape rising northwards from the plain into ridges and dry valleys. Its history also records the 2nd Duke’s planting of exotic trees and construction of garden buildings. The park in which Stubbs worked was an established, managed environment, developed before the 3rd Duke’s commission. The view combines sporting space with the landscape of a country estate. ^[18]

The tree at the right helps organise the visible prospect. Its tall trunk and spreading canopy rise over the workers and the small building, making this edge of the picture comparatively enclosed. Across the centre and left, the skyline stays low. The contrast gives the exercising horses open ground ahead of them, while the grey and its attendants occupy a sheltered-looking corner beneath foliage. ^[2]

Foreground roots and fallen timber provide a different kind of boundary. They run along the lower edge, below the horses’ feet, with leaves and small plants caught among them. These irregular forms bring the nearest ground into focus. Beyond them, the smoother green turf offers a clear surface for the figures. The rough foreground, occupied middle distance and pale horizon each give the eye a different amount of detail. ^[2]

The sky occupies a great deal of the canvas. Grey cloud masses drift across a pale blue expanse, leaving brighter openings towards the left. Against that large upper field, the figures remain comparatively small. Yet their dark silhouettes and the riders’ yellow clothing retain attention below. The broad sky makes the landscape expansive without reducing the sharpness of the little transactions taking place on the ground. ^[2]

An early commission for a changing house

Richmond’s patronage came at an important point in Stubbs’s career. Judy Egerton’s National Gallery catalogue describes his arrival in London around 1758 with anatomical drawings, followed by commissions from an aristocratic circle in which Richmond took the lead. His knowledge of the structures beneath a horse’s skin helped attract patrons interested in racing and breeding. The drawings preceded the publication of The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766. ^{[19] [16]}

Goodwood places this canvas, The Charlton Hunt and Shooting at Goodwood within a nine-month stay in 1759–60. They first hung in the Jacobean Banqueting Hall, where hunt members dined. ^[1]

The commission was therefore connected to the house in which its viewers gathered. The Frame Blog’s specialist study suggests that the three paintings received their restrained early neoclassical frames during William Chambers’s work at Goodwood from 1760. It notes architectural mouldings, fluting and hanging festoons. The dating is proposed rather than established by a quoted framing bill, but it connects their presentation with the decoration of the interior. ^[20]

Chambers was also responsible for Goodwood’s grand stable courtyard, built during the late 1750s and early 1760s. Historic England’s separate entries give slightly different completion dates, 1761 and 1763. Its flint walls, stone dressings and monumental entrance show the scale of investment in housing the Duke’s horses. That quadrangle belongs to the estate context; the modest building beside Stubbs’s grey cannot simply be identified with it. ^[18]

Within the painted setting, the building has a much quieter presence. Its low roof and small dark window lie close to the right edge, partly hidden by the tree and figures. It helps locate the attendants’ work without competing with the mounted party or turning the scene into an architectural portrait. The landscape offers a view outwards, while this corner gives the eye a place to stop. ^[2]

The contrasting kinds of equine subject can be followed in Stubbs’s paintings of racehorses and racing. Here, the individual exercising animals form part of a larger arrangement: spectators, riders, dogs, staff and landscape all remain visible. The yellow coverings even conceal much of the horses’ bodies. The effect depends on their place within the whole scene, as much as on the outline of any one animal. ^[2]

The painting beyond Goodwood

The picture featured in the National Gallery’s 2005 Stubbs and the Horse exhibition. ^[21]

Its imagery has also travelled through reproduction. In the restoration of Fox Hall, completed in 1993, the Landmark Trust placed canvas reproductions of two Goodwood Stubbs paintings over doorways: the Charlton hunting scene and the scene of three horses training. A Wootton horse portrait went above the fireplace. The Trust explains that these works suited the existing frames and the building’s hunting associations, although the paintings postdated Fox Hall. These are later reproductions placed in a restored interior, giving the composition a further setting within the local history of sport. ^[22]

The trophy maker Inkerman identifies this painting as the inspiration for its commissioned Goodwood race trophies. It also records the connection between the three exercising horses and the racecourse logo. The repeated yellow procession has proved particularly adaptable as an emblem of the place. ^[23]

The racing association spans a substantial interval: Goodwood’s first private meeting was in 1801, its first public meeting in 1802, decades after Stubbs’s picture. ^[1]

Looking back at the whole painting, the procession is only one part of its appeal. The grey’s lifted foot, the pointing arm, the crouching attendant and the dogs’ scattered positions offer different scales of action. Some movements carry across the field; others stay within a few inches of a horse’s body. Stubbs gives those activities a common setting while preserving their distinct rhythms, making work with horses a subject with many things to notice. ^[2]