English School, 17th century

While the author of this commanding stallion remains elusive, it is now widely accepted to be by the same unidentified seventeenth-century English artist that executed the twelve grand-scale pictures of horses painted for the hall at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire. The Welbeck series, from which one canvas was sold in these Rooms (20 November 1981, lot 27), was traditionally attributed to Abraham Jansz. van Diepenbeck (1596-1675), whose drawings of horses were engraved for La Méthode Nouvelle et Invention Extraordinaire de Dresser les Chevaux, written by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, and published in Antwerp in 1658.