Race, Gender, and Identity in American Equine Art

1832 to the Present

Jessica Dallow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351034326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte estadounidense

This book traces an evolution of equine and equestrian art in the United States over the last two centuries to counter conventional understandings of subjects that are deeply enmeshed in the traditions of elite English and European culture.

In focusing on the construction of identity in painting and photography—of Blacks, women, and the animals themselves involved in horseracing, rodeo, and horse show competition—it illuminates the strategic and varying roles visual artists have played in producing cultural understandings of human-animal relationships. As the first book to offer a history of American equine and equestrian imagery, it shrinks the chasm of literature on the subject and illustrates the significance of the genre to the history of American art. This book further connects American equine and equestrian art to historical, theoretical, and philosophical analyses of animals and attests to how the horse endures as a vital, meaningful subject within the art world as well as culture at large.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, American art, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and animal studies.

1 Interspecies Entanglements in Edward Troye's Racehorse Portraits

DOI: 10.4324/9781351034340-2

In 1833, the Swiss-born artist Edward Troye (1808–1874) created one of his most striking portraits, of the Thoroughbred racehorse Tobaconnist with jockey Ben and trainer Manuel for Virginia politician and turf man John Minor Botts (Tobacconist, with Botts’ Manuel and Botts’ Ben; figure 1.1). Troye composed the dark bay horse against a backdrop of leafy foliage and framed him with nearly barren tree trunks. Ben holds his reins and Manuel bends over to raise the saddle onto his back. Tobacconist responds by angrily pinning his ears and raising his tail, but Ben and Manuel are nonplussed. They are used to sensitive blooded horses just like the many other enslaved Black men who oversaw all manner of Thoroughbreds’ lives across the antebellum South, the epicenter of American racing, up until the Civil War. The year before, Troye had painted another enslaved hostler, Charles Stewart, with the grey Thoroughbred Medley (Medley and Groom, 1832; figure 1.2) at John Charles Craig's Pennsylvania stud farm Carleton. Craig invited Troye to Carleton that summer after seeing Troye's animal paintings in the spring Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition.¹ In Troye's portrait of Medley, Stewart, elegantly dressed in the vest and trousers worn regularly by trainers rather than grooms, holds the spotless, nearly white horse, a barn in the background. Stewart had walked the stallion all the way to Pennsylvania from Virginia to breed with Craig's mares.²

Figure 1.1 Edward Troye, Tobacconist, with Botts' Manuel and Botts' Ben. 1833. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: Katherine Wetzel © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Figure 1.2 Edward Troye, Medley and Groom. 1832. Oil on canvas. Private collection. From Genevieve Baird Lacer, Edward Troye: Painter of Thoroughbred Stories (Prospect, KY: Harmony House, 2006), 157.

Troye's paintings of the Thoroughbreds Tobacconist and Medley with trainers and jockeys follow English models. But in adapting his paintings to suit his American context, the artist substituted enslaved Black American horsemen for the professional jockeys and servants traditionally pictured with English horses. These depictions not only provide an important visual record of those instrumental to the development of American Thoroughbred horseracing in the American South, but also reveal how American Thoroughbreds served for these men as tools of constraint, prestige, and mobility within horseracing's schema of power and privilege under slavery. Troye's paintings of Thoroughbreds and Black horsemen are thus conflicting, ultimately unresolvable images that at the same time distinguish their subjects and reinforce antebellum America's deeply entrenched racial order.

Troye documented nearly every distinguished American racehorse over the course of his career. His paintings adorned homes and stables and were disseminated widely as engravings in the era's main sporting journals: The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine and Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage.³ Born in 1808 to a French Protestant artist family, Troye spent his early years in England training as an animalier, an artist specializing in the realistic representation of animals. He came to Philadelphia by way of Jamaica in 1831. Upon his arrival, he soon found a niche in the country's growing market for animal portraiture. Southerners, active in the Thoroughbred racing and breeding centers that developed first in Virginia and the Carolinas and later spread to Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Deep South, became his main patrons. When he wasn’t traveling for commissions, Troye also made his home in the South. He went first to Kentucky to try his hand at farming, then to Alabama to teach at Spring Hill Academy in Mobile. Towards the end of his life, he settled in Madison County, in northern Alabama, but continued to keep a studio at Blue Grass Park, his close friend and patron Alexander Keene Richards's farm in Kentucky. Troye died there in 1874.⁴ For Troye's white, wealthy patrons, his equine pictures served dual purposes. They satisfied genteel desires for images of prized animals and loyal help like those created for Old World sporting aristocrats to glorify the owners of exceptional equines and validate their participation in an elite pastime known as the “sport of kings.” From the early eighteenth century forward, sporting art became a powerful material means of uniting horseflesh and (white) human privilege. Troye's pictures, however, also provided visual evidence of a horse's appearance, one form of data in a growing, multifaceted record-keeping initiative that with pedigree books, race reports, and jockey club minutes served to legitimate the bonafide, blooded American Thoroughbred.⁵

Troye's reputation as a sporting artist has shaped much of the scholarship on him by sporting enthusiasts and historians like Harry Worcester Smith, Alexander Mackay-Smith, and Genevieve Baird Lacer. Smith wrote about and organized the first exhibitions of Troye's art during the 1920s and 1930s.⁶ Mackay-Smith's exhaustive research resulted in his indispensable 1981 publication, the Race Horses of America, 1832–1872: Portraits and Other Paintings by Edward Troye, which traces the artist's career by methodically identifying Troye's equine subjects and human patrons. And Baird's Edward Troye: Painter of Thoroughbred Stories (2006) collects together Troye's engravings for the American Turf Register to offer a glimpse of how they operated within the nineteenth-century sporting press. More recently, scholars have drawn attention to Troye's portrayals of Black American horsemen. Katherine C. Mooney interprets Troye's paintings as transparent illustrations of his patrons’ privileged worldview of racial harmony: idylls of fast, blooded horses maintained by skilled enslaved laborers.⁷ Pellom McDaniels III describes Troye as an “accidental historian” who, through his paintings, gave visual form to those men central to racing's early development and conveyed a sense of their humanity “beyond the canvas.”⁸ And elsewhere I have advocated for understanding Troye's paintings as first, multivalent portraits of both animals and enslaved persons, and second, as visual depictions of human-animal relationships wherein human and equine identities are shaped by one another.⁹ It is on this latter idea that this chapter turns to more fully examine Troye's paintings as representations of interspecies entanglements and as the products of spaces—the plantation, racetrack, and stables—where, ultimately, animal and human biopower were constituted and employed by and for different factions.

Troye and English Models

Troye tackled many compositional types during his career including horses alone, broodmares with foals, attendants holding horses, jockeys astride, and multi-figure human and horse combinations. His multi-figure paintings featuring enslaved trainers, jockeys, and grooms with horses date primarily to the first decade of his career, between the years 1832 and 1840. These include Medley and Groom and Tobacconist, in addition to Trifle (1832; figure 1.3), a portrait of a chestnut mare with Black trainer William Alexander and Irish jockey Willis; Richard Singleton with “Viley's Harry, Charles and Lew” (1834; figure 1.4), a portrait of a bay horse with Black trainer Harry Lewis, groom Charles, and jockey Lew created for Kentuckian Willa Viley; and Sir Bertrand with a Groom (1834-35; Yale University Art Gallery), another portrait of a bay horse and an anonymous Black trainer created for South Carolinian James Spann.

Figure 1.3 Edward Troye, Trifle. 1832. Oil on canvas. Collection of Kirk and Palmer Ragsdale, Rockwall, Texas. From Genevieve Baird Lacer, Edward Troye: Painter of Thoroughbred Stories (Prospect, KY: Harmony House, 2006), 157.

Figure 1.4 Edward Troye, Richard Singleton with “Viley's Harry, Charles and Lew.” 1834. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: Katherine Wetzel. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Of these multi-figure paintings, some have known patrons who likely determined their subject matter, such as Tobacconist, one of four equine portraits created for Botts in 1833. Botts had his horse painted because Tobacconist had accrued an impressive record, for example, winning the prestigious New Market plate in a race the previous fall. The jockey Ben appears with him, according to Mackay-Smith, because he was Botts's favorite.¹⁰ Viley likely similarly requested that Troye include Harry Lewis, a notable trainer, with his racehorse Richard Singleton (named after a South Carolina planter and turf man). James Burchell Richardson, the former governor of South Carolina, commissioned Sir Bertrand with Groom for his son-in-law, Spann, who had sold the horse seven years earlier. That Richardson was in the midst of dispersing his bloodstock suggests the painting was meant to commemorate his family's prior racing and breeding ventures, signified by both the horse and the unnamed man, misidentified as a groom in the painting's title, but who is clearly a trainer, evidenced by his beaver top hat, white shirt, vest, trousers, and dark waistcoat—the trainer's formal race regalia. To paint Bertrand, Troye traveled to Kentucky, taking with him a sketch of the trainer to include in his finished portrait.¹¹

The murkier patronage of other horse–horseman portraits makes it harder to determine why Troye included the subjects he did. For instance, it is unclear whether Troye painted Medley and Groom for Craig, at whose farm the horse stood, or for Medley's owner, Virginia turf man William Ransom Johnson. Trifle, a portrait of the chestnut mare Trifle with red-haired Irish jockey Willis seated astride, and enslaved Black trainer Alexander and an anonymous groom (painted the same summer as Medley and Groom at Craig's farm) may have been created for the horse'...