Benjamin Marshall

Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, on loan from 1967 to 1988;

Leicester, Ben Marshall Bicentenary Exhibition, 7 October – 5 November 1967, no. 7;

Tokyo, Museum of Western Art, English Portraits, 25 October – 14 December 1975, no. 37;

York City Art Gallery, on loan from 1988 to 2004;

Newmarket, National Horse Racing Museum, on loan from 2004 – 2009 and then from 2011 – October 2017.

Owned and bred by John, Lord Rous, later 1st Earl of Stradbroke (1750–1827), Shrapnell was a bay colt by Zodiac out of Latimer, by Volunteer, foaled in 1812. He was bred at his owner's stud at Henham Hall in Suffolk and ran his first race at Newmarket on 26 April 1815. In his first two seasons Shrapnell won 7 of his 21 races, accumulating a total of £323–10s. in prize money.

A prominent figure on the Turf, Rous took up racing relatively late in life, running five horses under his colours of Pale Blue Satin in 1807. With Dixon Boyce as trainer the two main bloodlines in his stud were from Quiz, who won the St Leger in 1801 and was acquired by Rous in 1807, and Zodiac, the sire of Shrapnell. Boyce was one of the leading Newmarket trainers of the period, winning seventeen classics between 1805 and 1829, including five Derbys, two of which were ridden by Bill Arnull, one of the most successful jockeys of his generation. Rous's contemporary fame was only eclipsed by that of his son, Admiral Henry John Rous (1795–1877), who effectively ruled the Turf for the last thirty years of his life and whose portrait hangs at the National Horseracing Museum, Newmarket, Suffolk.

Noakes suggested that the present painting was executed in 1814, at about the time Arnull won the Derby on Lord Stawell's Blucher. However it seems more likely that it dates from 1815, Rous's most outstanding season, when Shrapnell was at the peak of his career. Rous's other notable successes of that year included Tigris, by his other stallion Quiz, winning the 2000 Guinea Stakes on 25 April 1815, with Arnull as jockey, as well as three other Newmarket races worth 600 guineas. Marshall may well have painted both horses as part of the same commission in another painting for Rous now sadly untraced. At the time, the artist was living in Norfolk, where he had moved in 1812 in order to be closer to Newmarket and the important patrons who frequented the town. He remained there for twenty years, becoming an established member of the local racing fraternity and writing commentaries for the Sporting Magazine.