CHARMING KING

Charming King, foaled in 1909, tacked up for a pleasure hack on the grounds of his owner’s estate. I fully concur with Saddlebred historian Emily Ellen Scharf’s description of Charming King as a horse of “balanced and symmetrical perfection, who completed the sum total of a horse that might serve as a model.” This photo of the great old stallion is valuable because it has not been “retouched.” Customary revisions of the day included painting in the horse’s tail to look like the dock was standing up vertical, altering the shape of the ears, painting in a “mad” white eye, cropping the neck to make it look either longer or thinner, and tilting the image to make the horse look “uphill.” Instead Charming King is shown in a natural pose, with only a slight “stretch.” Unfortunately, they did have him in long “duck flapper” feet, both before and behind; this is done to force snappier folding of knee and hock. Saddlebreds like this one still exist, but because the beautifully formed neck is not long enough to suit the current insistence upon extremes in Saddlebred showing, if Charming King had been born today he probably would be gelded; a great pity, and very shortsighted.

Charming King’s pedigree contains one cross to Queen and two to Lute Boyd within five generations, and one close-up to Annie C. The stallion also has a line to Bellfounder, an important Hackney progenitor of American Standardbreds, and another to Blackburn’s Whip, equally important to American Quarter Horses. He also presents multiple lines going back through Indian Chief to the great Black Hawk 1833. A great pedigree, but the horse himself is even better.