Sporting Life
Sporting Life
Property from the collection of The Jockey Club (US) for the benefit of initiatives in support of the Thoroughbred industry
Edward Troye
Reel with Gray Racehorse
Lot Closed
October 25, 02:37 PM GMT
Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Property from the collection of The Jockey Club (US) for the benefit of initiatives in support of the Thoroughbred industry
Edward Troye
American
1808 - 1874
Reel with Gray Racehorse
signed E. Troye (lower left)
oil on canvas
canvas: 22 1/2 by 29 3/4 in.; 57.1 by 75.5 cm
framed: 27 by 34 1/4 in.; 68.5 by 87 cm
A. Keene Richards
Major Barak G. Thomas
Acquired by The Jockey Club, 1907
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Sport in American Art, 1944, no. 90, p. 20.
John Hervey, Racing in America, 1665-1865, 1944, vol. II, p. 200, illustrated.
Kent Hollingsworth, "The Equine Art of E. Troye," The Blood-Horse, December 23, 1967, p. 3949.
Thoroughbred Record, July 13, 1968, p. 121, illustrated.
"Edward Troye, sporting artist," The Magazine Antiques, vol. CV, no. 4 (April 1974), p. 803.
Alexander Mackay-Smith, The Race Horses of America, 1832-1872, Portraits and Other Paintings by Edward Troye, 1981, p. 262, illustrated, 263, 264, A423, 428.
Genevieve Baird Lacer, Edward Troye: Painter of Thoroughbred Stores. Prospect, Kentucky: Harmony House Publishers, 2006, p. 200.
National Sporting Library & Museum, Coming Home Series: Edward Troye (1808-1974), Virginia, 2014, pl. 30, pp. 108, illustrated, 109, 138.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Sport in American Art, 10 October - 10 December 1944, no. 90
Georgetown, Kentucky, Georgetown & Scott Country Museum, Edward Troye, 13 July - 31 August, 2003
Virginia, National Sporting Library & Museum, Coming Home Series: Edward Troye (1808-1974), 26 October 2014 - March 29, 2015
Troye's portrait of the grey mare Reel, a centerpiece of the Jockey Club's collection, is perhaps the artist's most famous and widely reproduced painting. Reel's glistening nearly white grey coat contrasts brilliantly against the dark walls of her stable, exemplifying Troye's particular ability to paint grey horses.
Bred by James Jackson and foaled at Forks of Cypress, Reel was one of the first full crop got by Glencoe in America, out of the imported mare Gallopade by Catton. As a yearling a half interest in her was sold for $1,000 to General Thomas Jefferson Wells of Wellswood on the Bayou Fourche of the Red River near Alexandria, Louisiana, who commissioned the portrait. The Wells' mares were kept them at the farm of J. R. Gross in Winchester Pike, near Lexington, where Troye painted this portrait.
Though Reel had an illustrious career as a race horse, winning 7 of her 8 starts, she is most celebrated as one of the greatest American thoroughbred broodmares in history. Her last foal, a chestnut colt of 1860, by Lexington, was the successful stallion War Dance, whose portrait Troye also painted and is offered in this sale. Her illustrious progeny relates also to the painting's provenance: pasted onto the back of this painting, in the hand writing of Keene Richards, is a label that reads
"Reel by Imported Glencoe
The dam of Lecomte, Prioress
(illegible) Starke and
War Dance.
Painted by E. Troye when
she was over 20 yaers old for Col.
Jeff Wells her owner who left
the Painting in his Will to
A. Keene Richards the owner of
War Dance."