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The timeless horses of Lucy Kemp-Welch
- January 20, 2025
- ⎯ David Boyd Haycock

In the late spring of 1897 a huge and impressive oil painting, Colt Hunting in the New Forest, was accepted for the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition in London. Measuring 10 feet wide by five feet high, it was the work of Lucy Kemp-Welch, a 28-year-old artist who lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire. It hung in a central position in Gallery IV in Burlington House, Piccadilly.
For more than a century, the Summer Exhibition had been one of London’s major art events. A jury of Academicians selected works for the show, which was open to members of the Academy as well as any other artists who wished to submit their work. By the mid 1890s, the exhibition often featured more than 2,000 works, attracting some quarter of a million visitors. With so many pictures on display, it was easy to overlook many of them. But most years there were one or two works that caught the public’s attention. In 1897, among paintings by John Singer Sargent, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Waterhouse and Stanhope Forbes, Colt Hunting in the New Forest was the standout work for many visitors. Charging towards the viewer, Kemp-Welch’s wild horses appear almost to be alive—galloping out of the canvas.
The Summer Exhibition
Lucy Kemp-Welch had made her debut at the Summer Exhibition two years before, with another large painting, Gypsy Horse Drovers. She followed this the next year, 1896, with two further paintings, yet Colt Hunting was even more remarkable. The critic for The Times predicted that Kemp-Welch “will very rapidly become our most successful and popular painter of horses.”

The paper likened Colt Hunting’s popular reception at the Academy to that received by another hugely impressive work, The Horse Fair, by the French artist Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899). Kemp-Welch’s comparison with this great French painter of horses was thus significant, suggesting the highest level of expectation.
Kemp-Welch’s youth, her gender and her diminutive stature helped to make the story of her Summer Exhibition achievement in 1897 so remarkable. But Colt Hunting in the New Forest was clearly also a very fine painting, demonstrating mastery that was to serve the artist for the rest of her life: careful observation from life, combined with rapid sketching. She always worked directly and accurately from nature—never from photographs—and she immersed herself completely in the world that she represented, often joining in the activity she depicted, be it chasing colts through the New Forest, logging or stag hunting.
Popular reaction
The popular reaction to Colt Hunting made Kemp-Welch famous through much of the English-speaking art world almost overnight, but this was only the beginning of what would prove an extraordinary run of pictures for Lucy Kemp-Welch at the Royal Academy. Between 1895 and 1930 there would be only a single occasion when she did not have at least one work exhibited at the Summer Exhibition, and she would exhibit a further 11 times between 1932 and her final successful submission in 1949

In addition to producing fine art, Kemp-Welch illustrated popular literature. She even received a commission for a series of Army recruitment posters at the start of World War I. It was around that time that Kemp-Welch received a very different sort of commission: to illustrate a new edition of Black Beauty for the London publisher, J.M. Dent’s.
Autobiography of a Horse
Subtitled “Autobiography of a Horse,” Anna Sewell’s novel had been an immediate bestseller when first published in 1877—Lucy’s father had bought a copy of the first edition for his daughters. Black Beauty offered detailed descriptions of equine behavior (including their affection and loyalty), and portrayed with sympathy the tough working life horses often endured.
Though illustration was not a large part of her output, Lucy had produced material for a number of books since the 1890s, and there was surely no one better able to illustrate Black Beauty. The title character was modeled on Black Prince—a horse given to Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a Boer War hero and founder of the Boy Scouts movement—by the people of Australia. When Black Prince proved unreliable as a military horse, Baden-Powell had loaned the handsome black stallion to Kemp-Welch.
The new version of Black Beauty was published in time for Christmas 1915. It featured a beautifully bound limited edition of 600 copies.

“Deliciously old-fashioned”
The Times Literary Supplement praised the book. “The color-plates are deliciously ‘old-fashioned’—by which we mean life-like, straightforward, faithful portraits of Black Beauty and Ginger, Merrylegs and the other characters in that much-loved tale. And the head and tail pieces in black and white have the same merits: they are pretty and they are right.”
The Observer was equally effusive, noting that “it would have been difficult to find an illustrator more competent to do justice to the task … than Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch, whose eminence as a painter has been undisputed since a good many years ago … The anatomy and the motions of the horse hold no secret from her, and her drawings of horses, both in line and in color, are beyond criticism.”
Such was the new edition’s success that it would go on to be one of the bestselling illustrated children’s books ever.
Adapted by permission from Lucy Kemp- Welch 1869-1958, by David Boyd Haycock, published by ACC Art Books.
To celebrate the publication of Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869-1958, her estate is offering a series of limited edition prints of some of her most popular images. These unframed prints come with an official label from the estate confirming the authenticity and edition number. Purchase prints directly from David Messum Fine Art, Ltd www.messums.com.