Sporting Paintings 2023

Richard Green Gallery has been a leading dealer in Sporting Paintings for 67 years. To celebrate Derby Day and the Coronation Year Ascot, we are presenting an exhibition of Sporting Paintings encompassing racing, hunting, fishing, archery, carriage driving and portraits of dogs and game birds. The works range from James Seymour’s early Match on the Downs with a grey beating the Duke of Bolton’s chestnut, 1733, to a magnificent 22 x 74 in panel of horses on the gallops, Early morning, Newmarket, made circa 1950 by Sir Alfred Munnings.

The Sport of Kings and the King of Sports is further represented by Ben Marshall’s depiction of Lord Rous’s bay colt Shrapnell with his trainer Richard Boyce and jockey William Arnull, 1815. Marshall was an incisive portraitist of the humans who inhabited the racecourse as well as the horses. He famously built his successful career after grasping that ‘a man would give me fifty guineas for painting his horse who thought ten too much to pay for the best portrait of a wife’.