Henry Barraud

together with a coloured print after the present work identifying each of the riders

Frost & Reed, London;
Private collection 

The canvas is lined. A faint craquelure pattern across the lower half of the picture otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals scattered areas of retouching throughout the composition. Held in a gilt composite frame.
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‘Such skelping of horses you never did hear,
As was in Punches-town on this present year,
Young & old there is thousands & money like hail
More power & success now to the Prince at Wales’
Joseph Sadler, Huraw for Punchestown, 1868

The present picture, a mounted group portrait by the English sporting artist Henry Barraud, depicts the nine winners of the 1868 Spring Festival at Punchestown near Naas, County Kildare. 1868 was an auspicious year for ‘princely Punchestown’. For the first time in its history the annual festival was attended by the 27 year old Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and his wife the Princess Alexandra, much to the consternation of Queen Victoria. Concerned for the reputation of the Monarchy in Ireland  just a year after the bloody Fenian Uprising of 1867, Victoria wrote to her son:  ‘I much regret that the occasion should be the races as it naturally strengthens the belief, already too prevalent, that your chief object is amusement.’ The Prince, who had made the journey at the request of Lord Mayo in honour of the inaugural ‘Prince of Wales’s Plate’, was quick to reassure his mother: ‘dear Mama, that you should fully understand that I do not go there for my amusement, but as a duty’.

Her Majesty’s reservations were short lived however. The Prince’s appearance was a resounding success: a public relations coup for not only the Royal family but the festival itself. One local journalist reported: ‘It is said that there were at least one hundred and fifty thousand people at Punchestown that year, so one can imagine the deafening cheers which greeted the Heir Apparent and his Consort. Such a crowd had never been so seen on an Irish racecourse before.’ (The Kildare Observer, 14 May 1904) In honour of the occasion the guest list was a veritable roll call of Irish aristocracy: Lord and Lady Charleston, Lord and Lady Powerscourt, Lord Mayo and the Marquis of Kildare, later Duke of Leinster, the Marchioness of Drogheda, the Duchess of Manchester, Lord Strathnairn and Sir Benjamin Guinness, the heir of the Guinness fortune. Henry Barraud immortalised the occasion in another large canvas, the Royal Visit, Punchestown 1868, known today by an engraving by T.L. Sanger (fig 1.). From Sanger’s print the grandstand is heaving at full capacity as the Prince, mounted on a grey horse, inspects the course with his entourage. Indeed, such was public’s appreciation that criticism was levelled not at the Prince Regent, but at the festival’s ‘wild and inhospitable’ location, deemed by one embarrassed reporter as unsuitable, ‘for a gathering of such calibre.’ (The Irish Times, 17^th of April, 1868).

Barraud’s portrait, The Punchestown Winners, presents the victors of the nine major races in the ‘Prince’s Year’ in front of an expansive Kildare landscape. Identified with the help of a popular engraving by T. Cranfield they are, from left to right: The Celt; Lysander; The Cardinal; Juryman; Excelsior; Hard held; Haynestown Lass; Olympia and Caustic. The inaugural ‘Prince of Wales’s Plate’, which consisted of a three and half mile course with a four foot wall, was described in The Kildare Observer: ‘The winner of the race in 1868 was Captain Pigott’s Excelsior, with Captain Harford in the saddle: A field of twenty-one started for the initial race, and for the next five years it was well contested, and was won by such good horses as Fertullagh, Rufus, Huntsman, Quickstep and Shylock’ (The Kildare Observer, 12 May 1894.). Barraud gives Plate winner ’Excelsior’ pride of place in the centre of The Punchestown Winners: an impressive picture commemorating the year that established Punchestown as the undoubted jewel in the crown of Irish National Hunt racing, a reputation it upholds to this day.