John Frederick Herring, Sr.’s The American Trotter “Rattler” Driven by George Osbaldeston is a finely observed painting that presents the celebrated trotting horse “Rattler” in motion, guided by the accomplished sportsman George Osbaldeston (1786–1866). Across the lower edge, Herring has recorded the sitter’s instructions to him: that Rattler ‘being a very hard puller the Squire had his reins cut as short as represented and held them after the style of riding a race horse’; that ‘the match cart & harness only weighed 2Cwt.’; and that the cart ‘was without steps built by Hitchcock’. The work thus comes with a set of marginal notes for the instruction of posterity. No sportsman of the period would have troubled to explain why his reins were held unusually short unless he judged the point worth fixing for the record, and no painter would have inscribed the coachbuilder, the harness weight, and the absence of steps unless the owner had supplied them. The picture is not merely a portrait of a celebrated trotter in match condition; it is a sporting document ratified at source.

George Osbaldeston led a full and colourful life: the most celebrated all-round sportsman of the first half of the nineteenth century, Master successively of the Atherstone, the Quorn and the Pytchley, Member of Parliament for East Retford, and the finest gentleman jockey, shot and whip of his generation. His 200-mile match against time at Newmarket in November 1831, twenty-eight horses, eight hours and forty-two minutes, for a purse of a thousand guineas, had by 1834 entered sporting legend; his 1826 victory on Clasher over Captain Horatio Ross’s Clinker in the celebrated Leicestershire steeplechase, his championships in cricket, rowing and pigeon-shooting, and his duel with Lord George Bentinck at Wormwood Scrubs were all in the public record. Small, about five feet six and eleven stone — but wiry and fearless, he was by 1834 a figure of national renown. He did not retire from racing until aged 69. The commission of so deliberate a documentary likeness in the present work speaks to Osbaldeston’s sense of the Rattler match as a performance worth preserving.

Rattler was an American trotter imported to England in the late 1820s and, on the testimony of Henry Coates’s Short History of the American Trotting Horse, ‘by all odds the best trotter ever taken there’. He is not to be confused with Young Rattler, the half-bred French foundation sire foaled in 1811, an error that has descended through popular reference literature. Harness trotting against time, and matches between gentlemen, were in the 1830s in the first flush of their English vogue, and the arrival of American horses of proven speed caused immediate excitement in the sporting press. Osbaldeston’s interest in the sport is well documented: his handling of the trotter Tom Thumb in a racing buggy along the Cambridge Road was spoken of in the same breath as his Clinker-Clasher victory. Rattler, the finer animal, was a natural acquisition.

Herring shows the chestnut trotting mid-stride with carefully articulated musculature, its movement purposeful rather than dramatic. His nostrils are flared, his ears laid back, his mouth slightly open against the bit. The harness is the light ‘match’ kind the inscription describes: a slender curved breastplate, a high leather bearing-rein secured to a brow-band pad, and the single long shaft of the gig running forward from the axle to the collar.

Osbaldeston sits high on the seat of a two-wheeled Hitchcock cart so pared down that its only visible upholstery is a thin black cushion above the axle bar. The wheels are of pronounced diameter, almost to the height of the horse’s shoulder; the spokes are fine and equal; the rim is hooped in dark iron; and the whole is built to the weight the inscription records. He is dressed in the white silk jacket, cream breeches and black beaver top hat of the period’s match driver, with a high white stock at the throat above a single black cravat. He has both reins, drawn back and held short, the long driving-whip raised and curving above, ‘after the style of riding a race horse’, as the inscription says. Osbaldeston appears entirely at ease with the pace. Behind the dry, straight road, the landscape opens expansively, bathed in light that breaks through a great blue-white sky of cumulus, and displaying Herring’s complete painterly ability.

Herring signed and dated the canvas ‘J.F. Herring 1834’, the unsuffixed form that preceded his addition of ‘Sen.’ from 1836, when his eldest son began to exhibit. 1834 was the pivotal year of his professional advance. Having left Doncaster for Newmarket in 1830, and moved from Newmarket to London early in 1833, he had settled in the capital under the financial patronage of W. T. Copeland (who succeeded the Spode family in running their successful porcelain business). In the same year, Herring was at work on the first of his Derby compositions, The Start of the Derby, 1834 won by Plenipotentiary, for the 6th Earl of Chesterfield, and on the portrait of Touchstone for the 1834 St Leger. The Rattler canvas belongs to the precise moment when Herring turned from regional sporting portraitist to the London painter of choice for the first equestrian commissions of the reign, in time becoming Animal Painter to Queen Victoria.

A smaller and earlier treatment of the subject, dated 1830, is held in the collections of National Museums Liverpool. Herrings’ paintings stand as both works of art and historical documents of 19th-century sporting life. By approaching animal painting with the seriousness traditionally reserved for portraiture, he depicted not only physical likeness but also character and presence, invigorating the genre and making him one of the most sought-after sporting painters of his day.