You have until July 5 to save up if you want to bid on Christie’s offering of a George Stubbs portrait of Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath with trainer, stable lad, and jockey. The large painting, which measures more than six feet by three feet, is described by Christie’s senior director John Stainton as “one of the finest sporting pictures ever painted.”
Gimcrack was one of the most famous racehorses of the eighteenth century. Valued today at thirty-three million dollars, the painting was last sold in 1951 for less than twenty-one thousand dollars.
Posted April 20, 2011