The best books about horse racing to buy now

‘There are just not enough horses’ heads looking out of the boxes,’ said William Jarvis as he ended a 140-year-old family dynasty training in Newmarket. We are losing too many like him. But racing has surmounted previous downturns as a remarkable new book reminds us. George Stubbs is credited as the first great equestrian artist to present galloping horses correctly, with all four feet off the ground rather than splayed out like rocking horses, but James Seymour – to my eye an equally talented artist – had at least experimented with the idea. After a decade of painstaking research, Richard Wills has produced in the sumptuously illustrated James Seymour (Pallas Athene, £170), a comprehensive guide to the output of this comparatively neglected and self-taught artist, and the illustrations assembled in his labour of love have enabled those two wise owls of horseracing art and history, David Oldrey and Tim Cox, to shed light on the racing scene in his lifetime, from 1701 to 1752.

Seymour was doubly unlucky. In the only fragment of contemporary biography available, diarist George Vertue called him a dissolute spendthrift who ruined his banker parent: ‘The darling of his father run thro some thousands – lived gay, high and loosely – horse racing, gaming, women and country houses.’ Art chroniclers since have run with that, although the South Sea Bubble probably did as much to ruin Seymour père.

The artist’s other misfortune was that he sought to live off his work in Newmarket at a time when racing was in severe decline, a decline which reversed rapidly soon after his death. Wills argues convincingly that the prodigious volume of work Seymour produced – from deft immediate sketches of grooms, dogs and huntsmen to classical portraits of the great Flying Childers – clears him of any accusation of idleness.