The Horse at the NGV: detailing our relationship with the noble beast

The many aspects of our relationship with the noble horse on show at NGV.

Partners in pleasure and pain

After spending a pleasant morning at the National Gallery of Victoria’s new exhibition The Horse, I repaired to Melbourne’s most storied hotel, Young and Jacksons, for refreshment. Outside the windows, the Swanston Street buggy horses forbore their gaily feathered headgear as they waited for tourists. Inside, I watched the races from Gosford, Rockhampton and Sale in Victoria. I didn’t back any winners, but I didn’t blame the horses for that. Jockeys and trainers may have been at fault, along with my own poor judgment, yet again, but not the horse. The horse, with few exceptions (who I will not name and shame here), is beyond reproach.

That perception is reinforced by the NGV’s magnificent — and free — exhibition of the horse in art, which unfolds over several spacious rooms and is grouped under five themes: Myth, Legend, Miracle (which is not, as I assumed, about my own punting career); Pageant; Conflict; Labour; and Pleasure.

Let’s start with the last. The Horse runs until November 8, the Sunday after the $6.2 million Melbourne Cup. You don’t have to be a turf student to know that in 1930, at the height of the Depression, our great race was won by the greatest horse there has been, Phar Lap. A film of that effortless victory plays on a loop on one wall.

Less triumphal is one of the centrepieces of the exhibition, the actual 1980 Melbourne Cup won by Robert Sangster’s stallion Beldale Ball. It seems likely this was also Phar Lap’s cup, the whereabouts of which has been one of racing’s mysteries. Historian Andrew Lemon has put together a strong case to support his theory that the 1930 cup was “repurposed” not once but twice, first in 1953 and then again in 1980, as the Victoria Racing Club sought to save money by re-using an old trophy acquired second-hand.

If Lemon is right, this is the first time Phar Lap’s cup has been on public display. It’s on loan from its owner, the socialite Lady Susan Renouf, the former Mrs Sangster, who was using it as a vase. Poor Phar Lap: born in New Zealand, he died in San Francisco. His hide is in Melbourne, his skeleton in Wellington, his heart in Canberra — and now we are told they recycled his cup.

No such ignominy for the champion Archer, winner of the first two cups in 1861 and 1862. The start of the latter is wonderfully captured in Frederick Woodhouse’s large oil painting The Cup of 1862. I’m not sure which horse is Archer as the all-black colours of his legendary trainer Etienne de Mestre are on three of the contestants. There’d be no such confusion if Woodhouse had painted the finish: Archer won his second cup by 10 lengths.

Also worth looking for in the racing part of the exhibition are Toulouse-Lautrec’s athletic 1899 lithograph The Jockey, Carl Kahler’s colossal oil painting The Betting Ring at Flemington 1887, with its two suspicious-looking jockeys amid the well-attired gentlemen and ladies, and, by way of contrast, David Moore’s black-and-white booze-infused photograph Bar, Beetoota Races, Queensland 1962.

I’ve always felt sorry for horses forced into war. They are such sensitive animals; one can imagine their terror at the sound and fury of battle. The exhibition is fairly gentle in this regard, with just a sprinkling of battle scenes from the ancient world, and also in Japanese and Indian art. The spectacular exception is Elizabeth Thompson’s 1875 oil painting The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras, one of the largest pieces on display. It depicts British forces making a stand during the Waterloo campaign. While the centre of the painting is dominated by the desperate red coats, the edges are framed by five horses: one dying, one down and the others nowhere they want to be.

A similar effect is achieved in George Lambert’s With the Light Horse in Egypt 1918: the horses are loosely corralled behind the soldiers, who are firing from the ground. There are dead men, dead horses and a sense of barely controlled panic.

There’s panic and bloodshed of a more natural kind in George Stubb’s instantly recognisable A Lion Attacking a Horse, which, let’s face it, is the sort of work you need in such a show if you want to keep the kids interested.

I described horses as sensitive, and by and large they are. A minority are sensitive in the sense that they are howling mad. The 1979 Melbourne Cup winner, Hyperno, won a lot of races because other horses were frightened to go near him. I thought of big, bad Hyperno when looking at Sidney Nolan’s Kelly With Horse from 1955, my pick of the exhibition. The bushranger is grim enough, his helmet becomes his head, his eyes flickering red squares, but his companion is like something out of an equine Walking Dead: dead white eyes, ears pricked, mouth agape, ready to unleash hell. He has company in the Durer woodcut The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the Pale Rider’s mount in particular looking disturbingly keen on his work, and in a dark little Goya etching El Caballo Raptor (The Kidnapping Horse), in which a young woman is seen being snatched by a savage steed.

I realise there is a fair bit of mayhem in the artworks I’ve described, but rest assured The Horse has its quiet moments too. The first piece visitors see on entering the space is Lucy Kemp-Welch’s massive Horses Bathing in the Sea (1900), which shows cavalry chargers exercising in the surf at Dorset. It’s a beautiful, peaceful image that is a fitting choice for the cover of the excellent exhibition catalogue. Septimus Power’s Toilers, showing a trio of draught horses at work, also has a calm strength, even if it does also remind me of tragic Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And Arthur Boyd’s etching The Unicorn Sees the Lady has a surreal, perhaps slightly creepy, serenity. I left The Horse reminded that here we have the noblest of beasts, even the slow ones.

The Horse exhibition is at the National Gallery of Victoria until November 8.