Punchestown Races, 1868

The renowned annual three day Spring festival at Punchestown has been a fixture on the horse racing calendar since 1 April 1850, when the Kildare Hunt Club had their inaugural race meeting. This fixture was revived in 1861 by the Marquis of Drogheda, but it did not become the popular race meeting known to this day until Tuesday, 16 April 1868.

The Prince of Wales, who was then 26 years old, was familiar with County Kildare from the time he had spent training in the Curragh Camp with his regiment, the 10th Hussars. Prince Edward had a keen interest in racing and was a fervent sporting enthusiast. There was another motive to his visit - it was believed that it would gain popularity for the Monarchy in Ireland. It is known that Queen Victoria was not keen for the young Prince to attend the races, as it had the potential for the Prince to gain a reputation for only being interested in such pastimes. However, the Prince reassured his mother, Queen Victoria that his attending the event was not just for his own amusement, but as a duty. The journey to Punchestown began at Kingsbridge Station (now Heuston Station) with the Prince and Princess of Wales, Lord Abercorn (Lord Lieutenant) together with their entourage including Lord Hamilton, Lady Georgia Hamilton, Lady Albertha, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, Prince Teck, among others, who are depicted in the picture and are identified in the key that accompanies the work. In 1868 the railway did not reach further than the village of Sallins, also in County Kildare and the remainder of the long journey was by carriage.

An account of the famous occasion was later recorded in the Society Pictorial and published in The Kildare Observer in 1904, which observed: ‘The arrival of the gorgeous cavalcade, the stately equipages and scarlet liveries of the Lord Lieutenant, and then the céad míle fáilte of the vast multitude as the future King and Queen of England alighted from their carriage, the Duke of Abercorn escorting the Princess, who out of compliment to Ireland wore a charming gown of green poplin trimmed with old Limerick lace.’ Apparently, there were approximately one hundred and fifty thousand people at Punchestown in attendance to see the great event of the Prince of Wales’ Plate. The race was established for the first time that year to mark the occasion of the Royal visit.

Photographic technologies were beginning to advance and remarkably, the first known photographs of the Punchestown festival record the Royal visit of 1868. The photographs were taken by John Chancellor, who ran one of the most successful photographic studios in Dublin. It was Chancellor who commissioned John Fergus O’Hea to paint this commemorative depiction of the Prince of Wales’s visit to Ireland’s national racing fixture. John Fergus O’Hea had studied at the Cork School of Design in the late 1850s. He was a political cartoonist and illustrator of considerable note and sometimes published under the pseudonym ‘Spex’. He was also the co-founder of the sartorial magazine Zozimus, an Irish publication similar to Punch. O’Hea produced souvenir prints of Chancellor’s photograph under his direction. Working with printing techniques may give reason to the possibility that the painting’s medium could partly be created on an early form of a printed or projected base.

John Chancellor loaned the Punchestown painting to the Dublin Exhibition of Arts, Industries, Manufactures & Loan Museum in 1872. This exhibition was organised by brothers Arthur and Edward Guinness (later 1st Earl of Iveagh). The exhibition showcased many of the great works from Irish Collections in the spirit of the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857. O’Hea’s work was titled as The Prince and Princess of Wales at Punchestown Races, 1868 and was priced at the very significant sum of 600 guineas. Unfortunately it failed to sell. Reviewed by the Irish Sportsman and Farmer and published in The Nation on 5 October 1872, the painting commissioned by Chancellor commemorated ‘the visit of the heir to the throne and the Princess of Wales to our great national race meeting. It presents faithful portraits of the best-known supporters of the Irish Turf; famous jockeys and racing cracks; and while the magnitude of the work evidences the enterprise and public spirit of Mr Chancellor, the manner in which it has been executed reflects no small credit on the talented artist, who, though still young, is by no means indistinguished…’. The unsold painting was exhibited again in 1888 at the well-publicised Irish Exhibition at Olympia, London. It was listed with the more descriptive title Punchestown, 1868 – Portraits of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Abercorn, the Prince of Saxe-Weimer, Duke of Teck and racing celebrities of the day.

The Royal visit to Punchestown in 1868 was also painted by Henry Barraud before O’Hea’s version. Similarly, Barraud also based it to some extent on Chancellor’s photographs. The painting also featured at the same 1872 exhibition in Dublin. Thomas Sangar executed a print after Barraud’s painting which was, according to The Art Journal ‘a “sporting print” of the highest order’ and an ‘agreeable acquisition to all lovers of field-sports’ (Art Journal, vol. X, 1871, p. 31).

We are grateful to Dr Brendan Rooney for his assistance in cataloguing this picture.