H is for Horse Breaker! Can’t believe it took me this long to get around to a chance to dr
H is for Horse Breaker! Can’t believe it took me this long to get around to a chance to draw a bunch of horses! I suspect there were a lot more than 49 women working in horse training in a capacity not captured by the census; the ‘horsey’ middle- or- upper-middle-class woman engaged in horse-swapping, schooling, and dealing appears in a number of Victorian novels. I highly recommend The Irish R.M., which contains Miss Bobbie Bennet as a classic of the type. A real-life version is none other than Ada Lovelace’s daughter Lady Anne Blunt, famous in her own right for her travels in Arabia– she was the first western woman to cross the Arabian desert– and for her foundational importation and breeding of Arabian horses (you’ll find her in any history of the Arab horse, with her famous Crabbet Stud). Here she is: I’m trying to wrap my head around a woman of the 1860s being described as a 'remarkable long-distance runner’ in her sister-in-law’s memoirs, which also say, “while in the prime of her strength she habitually rode a buck-jumper, which afterwards "put down” the crack Australian rough-rider of the day. Perhaps this was her proudest achievement.“ I doubt she described herself as a 'horse proprietor’ in the census though! -- source link
Tumblr Blog : a-to-zoo.tumblr.com