‘Seeing Familiar Things Entirely Afresh’: The Work of John Reardon On Show in London

If you are in London over the coming weeks with a few hours to spare, that time would be well spent by taking a trip to a retrospective exhibition of the work of John Reardon, entitled (After) Whistlejacket, at the MMX Gallery.

Reardon, who died in 2018, was a revered photographer and picture editor of the Observer, but this exhibition covers some of the work undertaken in the later years of his life when commissioned by his former colleague Jocelyn Targett to photograph the Darley stallions.

This is stallion marketing reimagined. Reardon's collaboration on the project, which would last for 16 years, came at a time when the Darley operation was expanding globally, looking to make an impact across the Thoroughbred industry. That it did, through Reardon's use of medium-format cameras and monochrome, his images featuring in lavishly produced brochures and head-turning advertising, both in print and on the racecourse.

In an accompanying essay by Targett, he says of his old friend, whose work prior to the equine sphere ranged from war zones to celebrities, “Racehorses, and the people in their realm, turned out to be his ideal subjects. Reardon's eye found the elegance, power, and plaintive vulnerability of whatever settled before his camera, and the thoroughbred is abound with elegance, power and vulnerability.”

The exhibition, in New Cross in south-east London, runs until July 1.

 

 

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National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame Presents A Tremendous Machine

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Secretariat's historic 1973 Triple Crown sweep, the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame will present traveling and onsite exhibitions honoring the accomplishments and enduring legacy of the famed Meadow Stable colt from May through October. The exhibitions are underwritten by Churchill Downs, Inc., the Maryland Jockey Club, the New York Racing Association, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the Virginia Equine Alliance, Dean Dorton Equine, and Godolphin.

A Tremendous Machine: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Secretariat's Triple Crown will journey the same path Secretariat did to become America's ninth Triple Crown winner. The unique traveling exhibit will open at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., for Kentucky Derby week May 3-6; advance to Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore for Preakness Stakes festivities May 18-20; and conclude its Triple Crown tour at the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, N.Y., June 8-11.

Following its Triple Crown travels, a more comprehensive exhibition of A Tremendous Machine will open to the public July 13 at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, coinciding with opening day at Saratoga Race Course. At the conclusion of the Saratoga racing season, A Tremendous Machine will travel to Colonial Downs in Secretariat's home state of Virginia for closing weekend at the New Kent-based track Sept. 7-9. The onsite exhibition at the Museum will remain on view through Oct. 29.

The traveling version of A Tremendous Machine will feature Secretariat's 1973 Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes, and Triple Crown trophies. A video component of the exhibition will take fans through Secretariat's unique journey in which he set speed records in each of the Triple Crown races and tell the stories of the people who guided the horse through his remarkable career.

“It is an honor to share the awe-inspiring story of Secretariat and the people around him on this golden anniversary of horse racing's greatest test, the Triple Crown,” said Jessica Cloer, the National Museum of Racing's curator. “We hope that everyone will have an opportunity to visit the exhibition at the Museum or at one of the tracks as we bring the incomparable story of the great Secretariat to both longtime and new fans of the sport.”

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National Horseracing Museum To Host Anne Ward Exhibition

The Racehorse: Past & Future, the first major exhibition by painter Anne Ward, will run at Newmarket's National Horseracing Museum from Sept. 17-Feb. 19. Showcasing 10 retired racehorses and 10 unnamed foals, some of the paintings are of such stars as Sire De Grugy (Fr), Big Buck's (Fr), Ouija Board (GB), Prince Of Arran (GB), and Oasis Dream (GB).

“Deciding upon a final list of retired racehorses was a gradual process, but I wanted to achieve a balance across several factors–code of racing, gender, distance specialism, plus a variety of colours,” said Ward. “It was also important for each individual not only to be either well-known itself, to have a recognisable achievement or a connection to a famous horse, but to have gone on to a happy and productive phase of life after retirement from racing.”

“The title given to each of the foal studies represents the mood of the painting and the impression that I hope it gives to those who see it, and not the subject's registered name.”

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Munnings: A Life of his Own

There is one blatant flaw to the exhibition of works by Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) that has just opened at the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket—and that is its lamentable brevity, ending as soon as June 12. Barely less obvious, however, is the aptness of its place in the calendar, incorporating as it does a long holiday weekend in celebration not just of a royal jubilee, but of national culture and (across the Derby and a Lord's Test) sporting tradition.

In the words of John Masefield, engraved on the epitaph for Munnings in St. Paul's Cathedral: “Oh friend, how very lovely are the things/The English things, you helped us to perceive.” It is a measure of the span of the monarch's reign that one of the final commissions executed by Munnings, actually not part of this quite marvellous exhibition, was of the young Queen with her finest racehorse, Aureole, before the 1954 Coronation Cup at Epsom—almost a year to the day after her own coronation. And to many admirers, Munnings will forever preserve the quintessence of an England never to be retrieved: pastoral, sporting and very beautiful.

Even in his own day, Munnings was a bulwark of tradition, with a notorious distaste for the artistic experimentation of contemporaries. His own modernity was confined to designation as a “British Impressionist”, and instead he extends a native tradition as our greatest equestrian painter since Stubbs.

So while this may be a busy time of year for Newmarket's professional community, its members must beg, borrow or steal whatever time they can to seize this quietly historic opportunity right on their doorstep. Some of the exhibits in 'A Life of His Own', after all, have never previously been disclosed to public view.

What a living piece of history, for instance, is the depiction of Humorist and Steve Donoghue being led onto the track for the 1921 Derby, loaned from a private collection. In his autobiography Munnings recalled making a study of the horse at Charles Morton's yard, on a sunny Sunday soon after his success, a scheduled run at Royal Ascot having been abandoned after he burst blood vessels in a gallop. Munnings and Morton then shared a couple of bottles of the celebratory champagne sent to Letcombe Bassett by Humorist's owner, Jack Joel, and after lunch the artist succumbed to the shade of a yew on the lawn. The next thing he knew, he was being woken by Morton's “pretty little wife—far younger than he—looking like Ophelia in Hamlet, wringing her hands” and crying out that Humorist was dead.

Then Morton himself appeared, his phlegm undiminished either by the champagne or the death of a Derby winner. He told Munnings to follow him into the yard for “a sight you won't see again as long as you live.” He threw open the door to Humorist's stall, and there he lay in the straw, one eye still open. There was blood everywhere. “Well,” said his trainer quietly. “There lies fifty thousand pounds' worth!”

Yet we today retain the priceless privilege of seeing the horse preserved in his vital glory by one of the great eyes ever to have united artist and horseman. Munnings invited Donoghue to his Chelsea studio to complete his prepared study of Humorist, seating him on a wooden prop in the famous black silks and scarlet cap; and he then made a social document of the background, with newspapers wind-strewn across the turf and a crowd hemmed between rails and tents and bookmakers' signs.

This exhibition, expertly curated by Katherine Field for the Palace House-based British Sporting Art Trust, encompasses some 40 works—not just oils, but also watercolours, drawings and sculpture—spanning 60 years of the artist's career, from recording the East Anglian country life of his youth to presidency of the Royal Academy. They incorporate samples of every stage in between: the Canadian Cavalry at war, the hunting field, landscapes, pageantry.

But Turf aficionados will especially prize the social documentation incidental to all this timeless art—as, for instance, the 1938 twin portrait of breed-shaping stallions Hyperion and Fairway for the 17th Earl of Derby, their grooms completing the serenity and veracity of the scene much after the fashion of Stubbs; or the casually attired, hatless riders following their dapper guv'nor onto the gallops against a summer sky of high cloud.

Munnings did much of this work in a studio converted from the last rubbing house on the Heath, a remote outpost near the end of the Devil's Dyke, working “in perfect silence but for the songs of skylarks.” Here he consented to a final racehorse portrait in 1951, having renounced such commissions after learning from Sun Chariot some years previously, “for the last time, the folly of attempting to paint racehorses.” What a benediction that he took so long to discover that folly, and not just for the town that welcomes him back to its midst for the next few days.

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