Ladies in Painting: Women’s equestrian portraits (19th–20th Centuries)

The 19th century was the golden age of horsewomanship. Progress made on roads and carriages had turned horseback-riding into a leisure rather than a necessity. The lighter all-leather sidesaddle with two horns, invented in England around the middle of the 18th century and derived from the novelty hunting saddle, had become very fashionable with ladies. […]

Ladies in Painting: Women’s equestrian portraits (17th–18th centuries)

Written by John H. Daniels Fellow Adélaïde de Savray When I first started working on the history of women’s equitation, I hadn’t realized to what little extent it had been researched, and how much it was marred by myths and misconceptions. Women have almost completely been left out of horsemanship history, mostly seen by modern […]

To Let the Cat out of the Bag: Cat Showing as Sport and Social Reform

In July 1871, upper-class Londoners were introduced to a new sport: domestic cat showing. Wire cages lined the interior of the Crystal Palace, a cast iron and glass structure built in Hyde Park for the Grand International Exhibition of 1851. Cats of all shapes and sizes reclined “on crimson cushions, making no sound save now […]

Some Early English Treatises on Dressage and Equitation

By Charles Caramello Scholars in equine history generally agree on the broad historical contours of early European dressage and equitation: Italian schools, particularly Neapolitan, introduced and developed the first modern systems of the two closely related arts in the second half of the 16th century; Italian and French schools advanced them further in the 17th […]

A Very Different Ireland: Harry Worcester Smith’s A Sporting Tour, 1912-13

By John H. Daniels Fellow, Professor Mike Cronin, Boston College As an historian of Ireland, I have been the lead researcher in the Irish government’s digital history offering for the period 1913-23, namely the decade of upheaval that led to the creation of an independent Irish state. The project, named Century Ireland, explores the day […]

Siegfried Sassoon, Fox-Hunting, and the Great War

1. Some NSLM Holdings As a quick search of the collection reveals, the National Sporting Library holds some 956 books on “fox-hunting,” ranging in date from J. Roberts, An Essay on Hunting (1733) to Alastair Jackson, Lady of the Chase: The Life and Hunting Diaries of Daphne Moore (2018). Anyone likely to be visiting […]

18th Century Military Equitation

A Brief Context Mounted warfare played a critical role in European affairs of state from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Essentially all English works on horsemanship in that period applied directly or indirectly to the military, particularly the many works focused on the British light cavalry, or “light horse,” prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries. These […]

The Cad, Part II

This is the final post in a series of four guest posts by 2016 Daniels Fellow Martha Wolfe. Martha’s 2016 Fellowship focused on studying The Life of an American Sportsman: Being Reminiscences by Harry Worcerster Smith, an unpublished autobiography. Undeterred by his spills the spring and summer of 1900, and against everyone’s advice, Harry entered The Cad in […]

The Cad, Part I

This is the third in a series of four guest posts by 2016 Daniels Fellow Martha Wolfe. Martha’s 2016 Fellowship focused on studying The Life of an American Sportsman: Being Reminiscences by Harry Worcerster Smith, an unpublished autobiography. I’m not sure that many people would have characterized Harry Worcester Smith as a good-for-nothing “cad;” on the other hand, […]

The Grafton Long Jump

This is the second in a series of four guest posts by 2016 Daniels Fellow Martha Wolfe. Martha’s 2016 Fellowship focused on studying The Life of an American Sportsman: Being Reminiscences by Harry Worcerster Smith, an unpublished autobiography. Many fascinating things came out of NSLM’s extensive archive collection of Smith’s papers, including today’s highlight, The Grafton Long Jump. […]