A real renaissance

NUMEROUS, SURELY, are the racing enthusiasts who’ve deduced that the sport’s magic can be explained by the beauty of movement. Looking down a home straight as silks shimmer atop thoroughbreds in full gallop, it isn’t hard to see what inspired Degas, Stubbs and Munnings. Neither is it surprising, surveying such a scene, to work out why so many of racing’s big shots (Peter Brant, John Magnier and the late Paul Mellon to name but a few) have either collected or continue to collect paintings, as well as horses.

Many Coolmore runners have carried the names of artists (Camille Pissarro and Jan Brueghel are among the recent stars), but John Magnier also possesses paintings by the actual eminent artists.

Just as components of his breeding empire have made him millions, so have those paintings. In 2018, Magnier was believed to be the seller of a Modigliani that fetched over $157m at Sotheby’s in New York.

Sotheby’s and its rivals are to the art world what Tattersalls and its rivals are to racing. Sotheby’s was founded in London by bookseller Samuel Baker in 1744 (books, not art, were a staple for years) some 22 years before Tattersalls.

Baker’s portrait hangs in a boardroom overlooking New Bond Street, into which Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe (and a regular Sotheby’s auctioneer), entered excitedly a few months ago to dish out his bloodstock discoveries.

“I found Tattersalls collegiate, like Sotheby’s, but also very visceral,” he explained, before sharing images from a trip to Newmarket last year, including a photo of him and Stradivarius at the National Stud. “Watching auctioneers going up in guineas was different to Sotheby’s, and we’d never use phrases like ‘do come and talk to us.’ It also struck me as informal. Our day sales are like that – a trading floor – but we try to retain a sense of decorum at our evening sales.”

Oliver Barker on a trip to Newmarket

Oliver Barker on a trip to Newmarket

Most artworks don’t need much space and swapping the many acres of Park Paddocks for a few indoor galleries around the saleroom at Sotheby’s would doubtless come as a welcome change to any bloodstock agent after days on their feet.

Goffs pitches up in central London once a year, and both Arqana and Aktem have rings in the Parisian suburbs, but, by and large, bloodstock steers clear of capital cities. Tattersalls isn’t, presumably, considering a move back to Hyde Park Corner any time soon and traders in both spheres will come to the market wherever it’s located, be that Newmarket or New York.

Oliver Barker doing the day job

Oliver Barker doing the day job

Talking of agents, while many a bloodstock buyer asks an agent to bid and sign on their behalf, it usually isn’t long until their identity is established.

Art auctions, by contrast, operate under a shroud of confidentiality. Buyers frequently don’t attend and instead use one of the sales house employees standing at a row of telephones: a smarter, if not entirely dissimilar, sight to bloodstock agents in baseball caps stuck to their mobiles, bidding only through diminutive gestures. That most bloodstock buyers can’t remain hidden is, however, par for the course. Most racehorses perform for the public. Art, by contrast, is often used only for personal consumption and a reason to visit auction houses when works “come up for air” between lengthy stints in private collections.

“If you buy a Stubbs,” says Lord Grimthorpe, “the next day it’s still a Stubbs. But if you buy what you think is a superstar yearling, it might end up not being so brilliant. Then again, they might win and their value will shoot up!

“There are similarities between art and bloodstock sales, such as the work that goes into cataloguing (be it publishing pedigrees or establishing provenance), but I think the bloodstock sales, world is generally more gladiatorial.

The Jockey Club rooms

“Most of the action takes place in the ring, where the big battalions are present.”

Grimthorpe may be largely correct when he says that artworks stay the same, and that “if you buy a Stubbs, the next day it’s still a Stubbs”.

Barker, however, was on the rostrum in October 2018 when a Banksy sold for £1,042,000, only for it to be partially shredded moments later. When the work was reoffered in it’s shredded

form, it fetched £18,582,000. During Barker’s trip to Suffolk, Lord Grimthorpe showed him the National Stud (of which Grimthorpe is chairman), and Robert Waley-Cohen oversaw Baker’s time at Tattersalls.

Well versed in both industries, the latter figure, owner of Long Run (2011 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner) and Noble Yeats (2022 Grand National winner), started his career at Christie’s, a Sotheby’s rival.

“Many people who like buying horses also enjoy buying art,” Waley-Cohen confirms. “In both cases they hope that what they buy will give them pleasure.

“Racehorses eat and get old, unlike art, which doesn’t eat but can cost you in insurance. It’s true that you get a slower burn of pleasure from art than from racehorses. I don’t think any work of art is going to make you jump up and down while you scream your head off with excitement.

“On the other hand, unlike a horse, a work of art might be around for your whole lifetime, and possibly for the entire lifetimes of your children and grandchildren, too.”

WHISTLEJACKET by George Stubbs, a near life-size portrait of a racehorse owned by the Marquess of Rockingham, occupies a prominent position in London’s National Gallery.

In Dedham, Essex, depictions of racing by Sir Alfred Munnings hang on the walls of his former home (now the Munnings Art Museum). In Newmarket, the walls of the Jockey Club Rooms abound with equine paintings.

Nearby, the National Horseracing Museum’s Palace House contains plenty of them, too.

On the other side of town, Ilka Gansera-Lévêque (see feature in our June 2025 Art issue) has converted three boxes of her training yard into a commercial gallery, trading work from a growing stable of global artists.

“We didn’t start selling art to make money,” she insists, though she certainly invests plenty of time in the project. “We did it to be surrounded by beautiful things. I think horses and art complement each other. Horses, after all, are works of art in themselves.”

That’s a view shared by Lord Grimthorpe who, like Barker and Waley-Cohen, hopes to bring Tattersalls chairman Edmond Mahony to a major art sale in London.

Waley-Cohen says scheduling has so far proved problematic, given such sales often clash with their bloodstock equivalents. As they work on Mahony’s availability, however, they should remember that he already has plenty of experience in the corresponding sphere.

“My father ran a fine art auction house in Dublin,” Mahony explains, “so I grew up in that world. Everyone assumes that art and bloodstock sales are comparable because an auction is an auction, but they’re actually very different.

“Bloodstock auctions are fundamentally based on livestock sales, rather than sales of goods and chattels.

“Things like conditions of sales are very different, too. At Tattersalls, for example, vendors can bid on their own lots, which they can’t do at Sotheby’s.

“You’re also dealing with different values. Fine art has at least an attributable value, unlike horses, who are only worth what someone is willing to bid for them at any given moment.”

Neither Mahony nor Barker were keen to sell lots in each other’s industry.

Mahony sold some art in his youth but was content to stick to bloodstock at big Tattersalls sales, and perhaps the occasional charity auction.

Barker responds with “absolutely not!” when asked if he’d consider taking to the rostrum at Tattersalls, even if he does admit that a charity day in which art and bloodstock auctioneers swap roles could be fun.

Mahony adds that the hushed “special” atmosphere and sense of theatricality that accompanies the sale of a valuable lot is a shared phenomenon in both disciplines and Barker, who last year wielded the gavel as a portrait by Gustav Klimt realised over $236.4m, concludes that buyers in both industries are, fundamentally, searching for rarity.

“That might come in the form of an important painting,” he clarifies, “or a yearling with a fantastic bloodline. Either way, it involves hypnotic passion.”

The passion that captivates players in both games might allow some top-end traders to overlook wider economic trends.

Fiscal policies and geopolitical realities can’t, however, be ignored by most. Take the war in Iran, which, among its many effects, has had an impact on the movement of goods in the Middle East.

President Trump may deserve part of the blame for that upheaval, though his “One Big Beautiful Bill” was cited as a cause for optimism by M.V. Magnier this summer.

“We need to get something like that here!” he told the Racing Post, suggesting that the tax depreciation allowed on purchased thoroughbreds from the bill contributed to immense trade at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale, which grossed over $118 million.

Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt, sold for $236.4 million last November