Free Eclipse by Nicholas Clee Page B

William Wildman had bought him from a Hampshire farmer for twenty guineas, and in 1769 stood the horse at the Gibbons Grove stud in Mickleham at a fee of five guineas. That was the year when Eclipse hit the racecourse, winning five King’s Plates and suddenly suggesting that his neglected father might be worth something after all. Wildman raised Marske’s fee accordingly, to ten guineas; by 1772, he was asking for thirty guineas, and was also taking steps to quash a threatening rumour that was circulating, to the effect that a stallion called Shakespeare, and not Marske, was Eclipse’s real father. Wildman’s advertisement for Marske in the Racing Calendar included the statement: ‘Mask [ sic ] was the sire of Eclipse. Witness my hand, B. Smith, stud groom to the late Duke of Cumberland.’ Most people believed him, but not everyone.
    The believers included the Earl of Abingdon. Once again – following his sales of Gimcrack and Eclipse – Wildman decided to offload an asset once its value started to rise, and he sold Marske to Abingdon, who paid 1, 000 guineas for the horse. The Earl, who sported the Wodehouseian name of Willoughby Bertie, bumped up Marske’s stud fee and earned back the purchase price within a season. Standing him at Rycot in Oxfordshire, Abingdon set the fee at fifty guineas, and a year later he doubled it. One hundred guineas was the highest sum commanded by any stallion of the era. The Sporting Magazine claimed that Abingdon demanded 200 guineas for Marske’s services one year, and the equestrian writer John Lawrence trumped that claim with 300 guineas, although there is no corroboration of these figures in the racing calendars of the period. Marske became champion sire 91 in 1775, and again in 1776.
    His involvement with Eclipse and Marske apart, Wildman remains of interest to us on account of his association with George Stubbs. One of his commissions from the artist was rediscovered recently, and fetched a small fortune. It is a painting of Wildman’s horse Euston, a grey son of Antinous bred by the Duke of Grafton and the winner of twelve consecutive races, including two King’s Plates, in 1773 and 1774. Euston, alert head turned inquisitively, is tall and fine-framed, and carries a jockey wearing crimson silks, which Wildman presumably adopted on passing his original colours to Dennis O’Kelly. The horse is set against a country landscape, possibly Grafton’s estate, with the land behind him falling to a lake with a walled tower on the furthest bank, and beyond that hills rolling into a misty distance. As in many of Stubbs’s paintings with country settings, the horse is posed next to trees – in this case, an oak and a willow, of a slenderness to match Euston’s physique. What is he doing here, ready to race and with a jockey on his back but far from a racecourse? The answer is prosaic, though the effect of the painting is not. Stubbs was not greatly interested in racing scenes, and quite often plopped down his racehorses against backgrounds chosen simply because his clients would find them pleasing. It gives his work an other-worldly, haunting quality.
    Stubbs exhibited the painting at his first, 1775 exhibition at the Royal Academy. After the Wildman dispersal sale, Portrait of a Horse Named Euston, Belonging to Mr Wildman passed through several hands, until no one knew, or could discern, the identity of the horse. Only when the painting went for cleaning in the late 1990s was the title revealed. Restored, the portrait went on sale at Sotheby’s in November 2000, and fetched £2.7 million – the third highest price ever paid for a work by Stubbs.
    The most touching legacy of the relationship between Wildman and Stubbs is the study – some call it a ‘conversation piece’ – Eclipse with William Wildman and His Sons John and James . It is one of the rare Stubbs paintings of a racehorse and owner,leading you