Edward Seago: From Ballet to Equestrian Paintings

"Le Carnaval" from 'Tribute to Ballet' by Edward Seago

"At the end of the summer of 1938, the Ballet Company was booked to dance in New York, and it was suggested to Edward Seago that he should go there, too, and show his ballet pictures. An exhibition of his work was arranged at the Carroll Carstairs Gallery in New York to coincide with both the ballet's opening and the publication of Seago's 'Tribute to Ballet.' 

Hardly a newspaper failed to notice the exhibition, but the serious art critics largely dismissed it as 'Not very deep stuff' and 'A lot of cleverness but very little design or substance in his work.'  With not one picture sold, he and his friend went with Mimi Cushing, a New York socialite, to stay at the attractive stone house of horse-loving Mrs. Mary Stevens Baird. His hostess recalled the name 'Seago' from a reproduction on a Christmas card of a painting showing two of her riding friends. This resulted in an introduction to a friend who had been painted on horseback by Munnings, and she offered Edward a fee of a thousand dollars to do a companion portrait of her husband. It proved the first of a series of similar commissions from hunt country people eager to be portrayed on their favourite horses.

So although most of the exhibition pictures remained unsold, these commissions proved to be the start of a steady stream of requests for equestrian portraits. It reached a crescendo when Edward made a chance remark to a reporter from a newspaper syndicate that was blown up into a story which made full-page spreads: 

"Ballet Dancers are Same Animals as Race-Horses, says Noted Artist'  

'A fine dancer and a great horse are, literally, the same in their bodies and in their temperament,' the painter explained. 'A dancer's feet and legs must develop the same terrific suppleness that a horse's delicate little legs have. If you watch slow motion pictures of a horse taking a jump and a dancer leaping into the air, you realized that the movement of the two bodies is identical...' 'The better a dancer is, the more nearly his feet grow to resemble an animal rather than a human foot. Nijinsky's feet were so far developed in this way that X-rays of his strange bone formation were recorded by the medical profession.'

Most reports  included a neat little pen-portrait of the painter who had expounded the entertaining theory, and one commented, 'Mr. Seago's only two hobbies in life; sitting on a fence watching horses and sitting in the gallery watching the ballet.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)