Greville, a chestnut thoroughbred held by a groom, with other figures by a barn

Parts of the outline of an earlier horse, over which Ben Marshall was evidently commissioned to paint Greville, can just be discerned in the picture, and it has been suggested that the original horse painted by Wootton was the celebrated Flying Childers. The latter, bought as a yearling by William, 2nd Duke of Devonshire (in whose liveries the grooms in this picture are shown), was the most celebrated racehorse of his generation and was never beaten.

Flying Childers was painted more than once by Wootton in the same setting as this picture. It may be an extraordinary coincidence that one version, in the collection of the late Paul Mellon, was only revealed to show Flying Childers after the removal in 1976, under the direction of Richard Green, of overpainting and a later inscription which had made the horse out to be Match'em (see J. Egerton, British Sporting and Animal Paintings [in the Paul Mellon Collection] 1655-1867, London, 1978, pp. 16-17, no. 16). The 1954 British Racehorse illustrated another version of Flying Childers by Wootton, again with precisely the same background as the present picture.