ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS SPENCER | THE BYERLEY TURK, HELD BY A SYRIAN GROOM

John and Gertrude Hunt, Dublin;

With Geoff Cowley, Drumleck, Co. Dublin;

From whom acquired in April 1990.

The Byerley Turk (c. 1680 – c. 1706) was the earliest of three Arabian stallions brought to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that are the original foundation sires of the modern Thoroughbred race horse. Known as the Pillars of the Stud Book, the other two are the Darley Arabian, imported into England in 1704, and the Godolphin Arabian, imported circa 1730. From these three horses, all Thoroughbreds in the world alive today descend.

The early biographical details of the much celebrated Byerley Turk are subject to speculation, however the most popular theory it that the horse was brought to England in 1689 by Captain (later Colonel) Robert Byerley (1660-1714), who had captured the stallion in Hungary from a Turkish officer at the Siege of Buda, whilst serving with the 6^th Dragoon Guards under King William III the previous year. Other sources suggest that he was one of three Turkish stallions captures at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. What is certain, however, is that is that he served as Captain Byerley’s charger in Ireland during the Williamite-Jacobite War. Public records show that a race meeting was held in the spring of 1690 at Down Royal, in Northern Ireland, at which the top prize, the Silver Bell, was won by Captain Byerley’s charger, and the horse later served with Byerley at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July that year. According to early records, Captain Byerley was nearly captured while reconnoitring the enemy ahead of the battle but escaped ‘owing his safety to the superior speed of his horse.’ In 1692 Byerley married Mary Campbell, the daughter and heiress of Sir Philip Wharton, a prominent horse breeder.

The horse was first sent to stud in England at the Byerley family seat, Middridge Grange in County Durham, and later stood at Goldsborough Hall, near Knaresborough in Yorkshire, which Byerley inherited from his father-in-law. A dark bay horse with a notably Arabian profile – Turkish horses being descended from those of Arabia of Persia – his most successful racing progeny was Basto, a dark bay colt bred by Sir William Ramsden and later sold to the Duke of Devonshire, who was an excellent racehorse and also the sire of Soreheels and the important foundation mare Old Ebony. In terms of his influence on the bloodline of modern Thoroughbreds, however, his most important son was Jigg, the sire of Partner who began to sweep all before him as a six-year-old over four mile courses in the early 1720's. Partner was himself an influential sire, but it was through one of his lesser sons, Tartar, that we get the great Herod. Bred by Prince William, Duke of Cumberland and described in the Turf Register as ‘a remarkable fine horse, with uncommon power, and allowed to be one of the finest horses this Kingdom ever produced’, Herod (1758-1780), along with Matchem and Eclipse, is one of three Thoroughbreds bred in England in the mid eighteenth century from which every Thoroughbred horse alive today is descended. One of Herod’s sons, Florizel, foaled in 1768, was the sire of Diomed, the winner of the first Derby in 1780, who was later exported to Virginia, where was an extremely successful stallion and became known as the ‘Founding Father of the American Thoroughbred’. Notable modern descendants of the Byerley Turk include Le Levenstell, who won the Sussex Stakes and the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes in 1961; Levmoss, winner of the Ascot Gold Cup and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1969; and Don’t Forget Me, who won both the English and Irish 2,000 Guineas in 1987.

Another version of this painting, with a different background landscape, was in the collection of the Earl of Rosebery at The Durdans, Epsom, in 1901 (illustrates in T. A. Cook, A History of the English Turf, vol. 1, London 1901, p. 149).