Painted racers Seattle Slew and Secretariat
R I C H A R D R E E V E S
Richard Stone Reeves, a prominent portrait painter whose subjects were all extremely beautiful if a trifle on the horsey side, died Oct. 7, in Greenport, N. Y. Reeves, widely considered one of the premier equestrian artists in the world, was 85 and made his home in Greenport.
Reeves’ daughter, Nina Stone Reeves, confirmed the death.
Commissioned by leading owners and breeders around the world, Reeves painted more than a thousand of the finest thoroughbreds in a career that began in the late 1940s. His roster of subjects read like a Who’s Who of horseflesh: Affirmed, Buckpasser, Cigar, Dark Star, Forego, Genuine Risk, John Henry, Kelso, Nijinsky II, Northern Dancer, Ruffian, Seattle Slew, Secretariat, Spectacular Bid.
His list of patrons, equally impressive, included W. Averell Harriman, Paul Mellon, Allaire duPont, Harry Guggenheim and the Aga Khan. In 1982 president Ronald Reagan presented Queen Elizabeth II with a special edition of Reeves’ 1980 book Decade of Champions, which included a commissioned watercolour by him of the queen’s champion racehorse Dunfermline.
Done in oil on canvas, Reeves’ paintings were neo-Romantic in style, setting sleek-coated muscular horses against pastoral backgrounds. Sometimes he included the jockey in his gleaming silks, and over the course of his career Reeves captured some of the best riders in the world, among them Ron Turcotte, Lester Piggott and Bill Shoemaker.
Mostly in private hands, Reeves’ work is part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N. Y., and was widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. He declined to disclose his fees publicly, but in 1997, Town & Country magazine reported that his paintings started at US$25,000.
Richard Stone Reeves was born in Manhattan on Nov. 6, 1919. He had a strong pedigree: His father, Matthew Sully Reeves, was a descendant of the 19thcentury American portraitist Thomas Sully. His mother, the former Edna Simonson, kept standardbred horses. Richard was raised in Garden City, on Long Island, conveniently near Belmont Park.
Reeves earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Syracuse University in 1941, and during the Second World War was a naval intelligence officer in China. One of his superior officers there noticed him sketching and, learning of Reeves’ passion for horses, offered to help him out when the war was over. He introduced himself as Bob Johnson, president of Roosevelt Raceway.
“I thought he had seen too much war and was suffering from battle fatigue,” Reeves told The New York Times
in 1972. “But after the war I looked him up, and he was president of Roosevelt Raceway.”
Among Reeves’ early works was a portrait of Armed, the 1947 horse of the year. After the painting was featured in Life magazine in 1948, commissions poured in. A longtime resident of Oldwick, N. J., Reeves maintained his studio in a converted barn on his property there, travelling the world to make preliminary drawings of his subjects in their natural surroundings.
Besides his daughter, of Manhattan, Reeves is survived by his wife, the former Martha Seymour; a son, Tony, of Basking Ridge, N. J.; and a brother, Robert L., of Olympia, Wash.