Taking up residence

Resident equestrian artists capture the glimpses behind the scenes that are the essence of the sport. Madeleine Silver finds out how a residency works and what it brings to both artist and viewer

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REACHING the top of Newmarket’s Warren Hill gallops with Sir Mark Prescott on a late-spring morning, artist Melanie Wright was greeted with an unexpected sight – Sir Mark’s string of Flat-racing royalty with their heads down, grazing in a bucolic woodland, roaming through the trees with their work done.

“All the chestnut trees and blossoms were out, there were these beautiful blades of green grass,” remembers Cotswold-based Melanie, who at the time was on a two-year residency in Newmarket hosted by the British Racing School. “It was absolutely magical and the last thing you would expect in Newmarket.”

This pastoral vignette is a snapshot of the privilege of an artist in residence, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of whichever entity they’ve been deployed to capture through pencil or paintbrush.

Once treated as an artistic sanctuary for creatives without the pressures of day-to-day life, residencies can be traced back to the Renaissance, with historians pointing to the 15th-century Italian politician Cosimo de’ Medici who invited artists to his villa as a front runner of the idea.

Today, it might be less of a solo endeavour – as Melanie says, it can be a highly sociable thing immersing yourself in a community – but tune in to almost any walk of equestrian life and there is likely to be an artist waiting in the wings, adding an air of interest and raising the profile of that institution or corner of the sport.