A house of Provenance

The Paddock

The horse taught art to look harder. The Paddock is a curatorial reproduction house for the horse in art — from Stubbs dissecting his way to Whistlejacket, through the sporting aquatints and the trotting lithographs and Degas at the rail, to the caricatured jockeys and the pre-1931 press record of the great champions. Painters, engravers, print firms, caricaturists, photographers: every one of them named, with the horse where it is known and the ground where it is recorded. The yard has always cared about breeding and attribution. So do we.

The Paddock is a house of Provenance, sibling to The Links and The Poster Atlas. We don’t invent the history; we curate and reproduce it, at museum grade, from sources anyone can check. Alongside the reproductions sits one commission that is entirely your own — The Silks, your family’s racing colors drawn as a period plate, named and dated.

The pre-1931 gate, and the split publicity doctrine

Two gates stand between a picture and this wall. The first is the simple one: nothing published after 1930 hangs here. Under the framework this house sells within, pre-1931 publication clears in the United States, and the gate is enforced in code rather than in good intentions.

The second gate is harder, because a picture can be perfectly out of copyright and still show a person whose name and likeness someone still owns. So every piece that depicts a rider, trainer, or owner carries a second verdict alongside its rights basis, and the site refuses to publish without it. The split runs along the licensing era:

Clear — the historic British turf: Long-deceased British figures with no post-mortem right of publicity in play: the Victorian jockeys, the Vanity Fair subjects, the riders the nineteenth century argued over. This is the lane the whole house is built on, and everything currently hanging here sits in it.
Under review — the licensing era: American racing legends whose names and likenesses are actively licensed today. These are human-gated and publish only against a logged sign-off. Most will never publish, and the honest path for the ones that should is a license, not a clever argument.
The horses: A horse holds no right of publicity. The great champions’ pre-1931 record therefore publishes as what it is — history — with any venue or stable mark caught in the frame handled under the historical-document doctrine and signed off, never advertised.

On races, tracks, and registries

You will not find a modern race, track, breed-registry, or governing-body mark in this house’s branding, its slugs, its keywords, or its commission. Not in a collection name, not in a chapter tagline, not in a template default. Racing’s great names are among the most fiercely held marks in sport, and we have no business trading on them. A build-time lint enforces the rule over our site copy, every piece slug, every collection and chapter name and tagline, and every field the commission ships with — and fails the deploy if one slips through.

Two deliberate exceptions, both narrow — and both outside that lint on purpose. A genuine period artefact may carry a historical race, venue, or stable name in its own frame or documented title: the signage behind a 1920 press photograph, or Herring’s 1836 portrait of a St Leger winner, which is simply what that painting is called. We reproduce the artefact as the historical document it is, with the naming flagged on the piece. Calling a period work by its real name is historical reference, not a house mark, and we will not rename a painting to look tidier. And when you type your own ground or your own colors into your own commemorative, that is your speech, not our marketing: we never pre-populate the field, never autocomplete it, and never suggest a name to you.

The sourcing promise

Every reproduction is traced to a named source and, where the holding institution assigns one, an accession number. Everything hanging today comes from an open archive: the Yale Center for British Art’s open-access sporting collection, the National Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay, Worcester College at Oxford, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the USC Digital Library, and CCNY Libraries — each one verified against a live source record before the piece was allowed to publish. We hold no house originals and have licensed nothing; if that changes, this page will say so before the catalogue does. Source and accession appear on every piece, plainly, as a commitment rather than a footnote.

Every piece names its painter or its print firm, the horse where the record knows it, and the ground where the record states it — and where it does not, we say so rather than guess. Where restoration is done, it is disclosed on the piece. We repair what age did to the scan; we do not improve what the artist did.

The registry promise

No piece publishes without a CLEAR verdict, enforced in code at the route and again at build time. Right now that means 93 pieces are hanging and 1 are being held back — some because the pre-1931 gate or a publicity verdict hasn’t cleared, some because we haven’t yet found a scan good enough to sell. We would rather show you a short wall than an unearned one.

The watch list runs on a clock, not a whim: material whose copyright expires under the 95-year rule unlocks at midnight on the first of January, automatically. That is how the 1930s racing record comes to us — a year at a time, in January, never sooner. The next slate opens January 2027, and nothing can be published early — not by us, not by anyone.

The collections, so far

One house, walked as a training morning: the yard before light, the string at full stretch, and the names on the board.

The Paddock is a house of the Provenance family, sibling to The Links and The Poster Atlas. Read how the plate, the stone, and the shutter made these pictures →