Horse Painting

During the War, when George Bernard Shaw wanted to give a symbolic habitation and a name to two great elements of 20th-century English upper-class society, he called one "Heartbreak House" and the other "Horseback Hall." Last week in Washington, an exhibition at the new branch gallery of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art showed the spick & span art of Horseback Hall as it was in its far from heartbroken heyday in the 19th Century. Among 60 pictures, most of them hunting and racing scenes, were examples by such eminent specialists as Henry Alken, Benjamin Marshall and the stagecoach driver, John Frederick Herring, favorite of George IV and Queen Victoria. Fox-hunting gentry from nearby Virginia and Maryland also found pleasure in a handful of pictures by modern sporting artists.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan one of the most remarkable of these contemporary horsey artists was having a one-man show at the Walker Galleries. A lanky man of 42 with a boyish, weathered face, bristling grey hair and swinging limp, Artist Lee Townsend is probably the only professional horse trainer in the U. S. who is also a professional painter. His race-track pictures are consequently as authentic in their day as Ben Marshall's pictures of small-headed, satiny thoroughbreds, gaitered grooms and upright jockeys were in his.

Born next door to the county fair grounds in Wyoming, Ill., blue-eyed Lee Townsend hung around horses from the time he could walk. Gypsy horse traders who camped near the track every summer taught him how to judge a horse's legs and wind. When he was older, he walked race horses around the ring while the grooms shook up the stalls. On Sundays he read funny papers to an old Negro jockey named Tom Connors, wrote letters for him to his girls. It was several years before young Townsend learned why the old Negro used to line his room with newspapers and smoke a sweet-smelling pipe before he rode a race. Tom was a hophead.

When he was 17, Lee Townsend bought his first race horse, Ophelia Martin. He rode her and other men's horses at county fairs in Illinois for a couple of years before his left foot was smashed in a spill. By that time Lee Townsend knew that he wanted to be an artist. So with the money he had saved he went to Chicago's Art Institute for two years, then to Manhattan, where he worked in a drawing class with Mahonri Young. Since then, except for one frugal year in Paris, Artist Townsend has been back on the race tracks every summer because he likes the life.

As a horse trainer, Townsend sometimes races his own horses, sometimes goes on shares with other owners. He travels with the horses, in a truck. His affection is not for the bigtime tracks but for the half-mile county fair circuit in Pennsylvania. Ohio and Illinois which horsemen know as the Frying Pan or Leaky Roof circuit. In 20 years he has acquired a vast acquaintance with this circuit's "bush-riders," carnival people, horse breeders, newspapermen, and with the character of each small-town track. Both Lee Townsend's friends and Manhattan critics last week found the new paintings he had made out of this material well above the run of present-day sporting pictures. Highlights:

Starting Before the Shower, six jittery horses dancing and rearing under jouncing jockeys in the gloom of a stormy afternoon, while a wall of white raincloud sweeps up beyond the white curve of the track fence.

Leading a Winner, a groom with a dirty rub rag looped from one hip pocket to another, leading a sweating thoroughbred into the paddock, the jockey hunched up like a peanut on his back.

Smitty's Tack* Room, showing the jockey's iron bed, saddle & bridle on a peg, table with empty beer bottles, and the cheap fur coat and red slippers of one of Smitty's girlfriends.

Tragedy at the Quarter Pole, a piece which has the curious, wooden silence of a sporting audience when somebody gets killed: a jockey's white legs, half doubled up, seen through a crowd on the track: two men bringing a mattress; an interne bending over; in the background the striped quarter pole, and a jagged arm thrown up by the broken fence (see cut).

-''Tack'': saddle, bridle, whip and other racint equipment.

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