James Lynwood Palmer 1868-1941

Commissioned by Mr John Hay Whitney, New York in 1930;
Mary Elizabeth Altemus Whitney, received as a gift from the above;
Red Fox Gallery, New York;
Mr and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, by whom acquired from the above 31st May 1988

Ivor Herbert and Patricia Smyley, The Winter Kings, 1968;
Reg Green, A Race Apart.  The History of the Grand National, 1988

Palmer's picture portrays two of Mr 'Jock' Whitney's famous steeplechasers, Easter Hero and Sir Lindsay, who were both racing in England during the same period in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The picture is dated 1930, the year Easter Hero won his second Cheltenham Gold Cup, achieved in successive years.  This magnificent work hung in the Great Room at Greentree (see Fig.1).

Easter Hero was a chestnut gelding, bred by an Irish farmer known locally as 'Old Larry' King in 1920 by My Prince out of Easter Week. The gelding's other big race wins came in the 1931 Champion Chase (dead-heated), the Molyneux Chase of 1926, the Becher Chase of 1927 and the Coventry Chase in 1928. In all, he won twenty one and a half of his forty races between 1925 and 1931, and was the outstanding steeplechaser of his day. He was largely responsible for the greater popularisation of steeplechasing as a spectator sport on both sides of the Atlantic. Easter Hero was also famous for an incident in the 1928 Grand National when he was leading the race and completely misjudged the open ditch at the Canal Turn. He landed squarely on top of the fence, where he was left straddling the obstacle, while thirty-odd horses bore down on him. What followed was chaos as horses and jockeys attempted to take evasive action, resulting in the worst pile up ever seen on a racecourse. From a field of forty two runners, only two horses completed the course. After his racing career, Easter  Hero was shipped to Mr Whitney's stud in Virginia, where he enjoyed a happy retirement and lived to the excellent age of twenty eight.

Mr Whitney's Sir Lindsay ran his finest race in the 1930 Grand National, where he was an unlucky loser. His Welsh jockey Dudley Williams lost one of his stirrups when the horse pecked slightly and, in one of the closest finishes in the race's history, finished third beaten a neck and one-and-a-half lengths.