An impeccable pedigree

Henry Stull records the victory of the thoroughbred Broomstick in New York. From the collection of Marylou Whitney and John Hendrickson, the work combines racing history and art patronage.

Self-taught, Henry Stull learned his trade on the job, working as an illustrator for the American equestrian press. In the 1890s-1900s, he became the most sought-after painter by East Coast trotting and thoroughbred stables, notably Belmont, Lorillard, Whitney and Keen. In 1904, he painted Brighton Handicap (Broomstick First; Irish Lad Second)for Keen , commemorating the victory of the Broomstick horse in the Brighton Handicap, a race organized by the Brighton Beach Racing Association in New York . In this oil painting, Stull adopts the codes inherited from the British tradition : lateral profile of the horse, strict hierarchy between mount and jockey, background reduced to essentials. We find all the canons of the equestrian genre, of which Stull is a benchmark alongside Richard Stone Reeves and Franklin Voss. Born in 1901 at the James R. Keene stud , Broomstick was acquired in 1908 by Harry Payne Whitney (1872-1930) to become one of the founding stallions of his family’s stud farm, Whitney Stud at Brookdale Fam in New Jersey. The work passed into the hands of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (1899-1992), son of Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, great thoroughbred owners and patrons of modern art. In 1958, Cornelius married Marylou Whitney (1925-2019), a leading figure in the horse-racing world and a patron of the arts in her own right, before sharing her commitment to the racing community with her second husband John Hendrickson.