The Race is On, the Kentucky Equine Art Exhibition

Latonia
Charles W. White (19th Century)
Oil on canvas
35.5" x 71.25"
Cross Gate Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky
Collection of Bobby Friesburg

Mrs. Russell & Foal
Thomas J. Scott (1824-1888)
Oil on canvas
20" x 15"
Collection of Gordon & Carolyn Burnette

The Oakland course was created by the seventy-six-member Louisville Association for the Improvement of the Breed of Horses, and located on the west side of Oakland Plank Road (Seventh Street) at Magnolia Avenue.  It “offered picturesque views framed by the tall graceful oaks that gave the course its name.”  On the beautiful grounds was the Oakland House, an imposing three-story Greek Revival building, which served as a clubhouse and visitor’s hotel.  Women were made welcome in the clubhouse by a handsomely furnished ladies’ room and a private pavilion.” (Yater)  By the late 1830s Oakland had become the first track to gain national attention, securing Kentucky’s reputation as the racehorse capital of America. 

The course is best remembered as the site of the famous race of Kentucky bred Grey Eagle, against Louisiana bred Wagner, held September 30, 1839.  To gain the record purse of $20,000 the best horse would have to win two out of three races of four-mile heats.  More than ten thousand people are thought to have thronged the course to witness the run; so many that the trees were full of spectators and carriages ringed the field.  Wagner won the first race easily.  Though Gray Eagle made a promising start in the second heat, Wagner pulled ahead in the final stretch to win with a time of 7:44, the “best ever south of the Potomac” according to the Louisville Daily Journal.  Kentuckians, ticked by the affront to Kentucky’s much superior position above Louisiana demanded a rematch, to which the Creole faction graciously consented.  So, on October 5, 1839 the stallions ran again, Gray Eagle winning the first heat by a whole length, bolstering Kentucky pride, which slumped again after Wagner won the second match-up.  Near hysteria ensued as the competitors lunged forth in the final race.   Though Gray Eagle took a commanding lead Wagner came up the stretch from behind and bumped Gray Eagle who stumbled, then limped to the finish line a loser yet again.  Murmurs of sabotage wafted through the crowd who must have then retired to the clubhouse for a julep, licking their wounds with the sure knowledge that all the fuss would surely benefit Kentucky horse racing in the long run.  Various financial panics in the 1840s crimped Oakland’s style; deterioration forced closure in the late 1850s.  For many years the property stood vacant, attracting a criminal caste whose doings inspired Alice Hegan Rice’s Miss Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch to speak warily of those who might do “an Oakland”.   If the painting ever hung at Oakland it left there at some point, only to turn up in a gallery in Ohio in 1956 when it was acquired by the Speed.

Robert Brammer was born in Waterford, Ireland and first appears in the Louisville City Directory, 1838-39, as an artist who “will always have on hand a number of oil paintings and views in the United States which he will dispose of on moderate terms.”  By 1840 he had formed the partnership with Von Smith indicated on the tree trunk of the Oakland Race Course painting.   Von Smith was a German born itinerant portrait artist “who had earlier been active…in Vincennes, Indiana.” (Jones & Weber) They subsequently opened a studio in New Orleans, 1842, after which nothing is heard of Herr Von Smith again. Brammer, on the other hand, became a part of the Kentucky/Mississippi itinerancy, working in collaboration with Theodore Sidney Moise and James Henry Beard as a background painter for portraits in the grand manner.  During his ten recorded years in New Orleans he “advertised as a landscape painter, especially of scenery along the American rivers, and was perhaps the earliest such specialist to live” in the Crescent City.  (Mahe & McCaffrey)  Brammer’s signature rendering of tree foliage in the European rocaille fashion is to be seen in this painting as well as in a Mississippi panoramic view now in the Ogden Collection, New Orleans.