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Lot Essay
Bred by William Cornforth and foaled in 1768, Sweet William was by Syphon out of Miss Roan. He was purchased by Lord Bolingbroke in 1768 and won his first race for four-year-olds at the Newmarket Spring Meeting in 1772. He was then acquired by Lord Grosvenor for whom in 1772 he won a sweep of 1,800 guineas beating Sir Charles Bunbury's Smallhopes and the Duke of Ancaster's Nisus. He went on to win numerous other races at Burford, Shrewsbury, and Newmarket, including the Craven Stakes in 1774 and The Whip in 1775. Sweet William was beaten only four times and his winnings totalled 7,235 guineas provided a profit of 6,705 guineas (W. Pick, The Turf Register, 1805, vol. II, pp. 292-5). From 1778-86 Sweet William stood as a stallion in Lord Grosvenor's stud at Oxcroft Farm, near Newmarket (where he died in 1789).
Lord Grosvenor had a fondness for naming horses after flowers (and after goddesses); his stud included Daphne, Primrose, Cowslip, Snapdragon, Ceres, and Sweetbriar. Equally, Stubbs liked introducing flowering plants into his portraits of racehorses and stallions. In this portrait, Sweetwilliam flowers in the foreground of its namesake's portrait, just as Sweetbriar does in the portrait of that horse which Lord Grosvenor also commissioned from Stubbs.
This is a larger, second version of a portrait dated 1779 and commissioned by Lord Grosvenor, Stubb's greatest early patron (J. Egerton, "The Painter and the Peer; Stubbs and the Patronage of the 1st Lord Grosvenor," Country Life, 22 November 1979, pp. 1892-3). The original version, painted in oil on panel (22 x 28 in.), was among several works by Stubbs which were sold in 1812 by the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, who had not inherited his father's passion for racing and breeding horses (resold; Christie's London, 20 November 1987, lot 26).
This second version, repeated (presumably with Lord Grosvenor's permission) on a large scale and on canvas some ten years after the original version, was painted as part of a very ambitious project to present a pictorial Review of the Turf... from the year 1750 to the present time. The idea behind the project was to reach a popular market by combining the skills of Stubbs himself and of George Townly Stubbs (presumed to be his illegitamate son), a professional engraver; Stubbs would paint and George Townly Stubbs would engrave a long series of 'Portraits of Celebrated Racehorses.' Many of these portraits were, like the portrait of Sweet William, repetitions; and the dates Stubbs inscribed on them were the dates of the original paintings. Here there was no intent to deceive, but to record historical facts; racing men, would know, for instance, that Sweet William had been in his prime in 1779, not 1794, when the engraving after Stubbs's portrait of him was published. Only sixteen of the projected series of celebrated racehorses were painted and engraved; these were exhibited as the 'Turf Gallery' in or about 1794, before the project failed, one of the many victims of the slump in the print trade as a result of the French Revolutionary Wars.
An earlier portrait by Stubbs called Sweet William with a Groom, also painted for Lord Grosvenor and dated 1770, remains in his descendants' collection (T.A. Cook, A History of the English Turf, 1901, p. 214, illustrated).
We are grateful to Mrs. Judy Egerton for contributing this catalogue entry.
Lord Grosvenor had a fondness for naming horses after flowers (and after goddesses); his stud included Daphne, Primrose, Cowslip, Snapdragon, Ceres, and Sweetbriar. Equally, Stubbs liked introducing flowering plants into his portraits of racehorses and stallions. In this portrait, Sweetwilliam flowers in the foreground of its namesake's portrait, just as Sweetbriar does in the portrait of that horse which Lord Grosvenor also commissioned from Stubbs.
This is a larger, second version of a portrait dated 1779 and commissioned by Lord Grosvenor, Stubb's greatest early patron (J. Egerton, "The Painter and the Peer; Stubbs and the Patronage of the 1st Lord Grosvenor," Country Life, 22 November 1979, pp. 1892-3). The original version, painted in oil on panel (22 x 28 in.), was among several works by Stubbs which were sold in 1812 by the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, who had not inherited his father's passion for racing and breeding horses (resold; Christie's London, 20 November 1987, lot 26).
This second version, repeated (presumably with Lord Grosvenor's permission) on a large scale and on canvas some ten years after the original version, was painted as part of a very ambitious project to present a pictorial Review of the Turf... from the year 1750 to the present time. The idea behind the project was to reach a popular market by combining the skills of Stubbs himself and of George Townly Stubbs (presumed to be his illegitamate son), a professional engraver; Stubbs would paint and George Townly Stubbs would engrave a long series of 'Portraits of Celebrated Racehorses.' Many of these portraits were, like the portrait of Sweet William, repetitions; and the dates Stubbs inscribed on them were the dates of the original paintings. Here there was no intent to deceive, but to record historical facts; racing men, would know, for instance, that Sweet William had been in his prime in 1779, not 1794, when the engraving after Stubbs's portrait of him was published. Only sixteen of the projected series of celebrated racehorses were painted and engraved; these were exhibited as the 'Turf Gallery' in or about 1794, before the project failed, one of the many victims of the slump in the print trade as a result of the French Revolutionary Wars.
An earlier portrait by Stubbs called Sweet William with a Groom, also painted for Lord Grosvenor and dated 1770, remains in his descendants' collection (T.A. Cook, A History of the English Turf, 1901, p. 214, illustrated).
We are grateful to Mrs. Judy Egerton for contributing this catalogue entry.