For the Track – (John Frederick Peto) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: John Frederick Peto

Date: 1895

Size: 111 x 76 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

A red jockey’s cap, a riding crop, a horseshoe, a spur, and bits of posters and papers are tacked and pasted against a wooden forest-green door, which fills this vertical painting. At the midline about a third of the way down the composition, the crimson-red cap hangs from a loop on a nail so we look onto the button on the soft top and the rounded brim, below. It overlaps a long, tapered, stick-like riding crop, which angles from the upper right corner to the lower left of the composition. The crop has a shallow knob at its top, and it hangs from a leather strap around another nail driven into the door. Immediately above the red cap is a slightly misshapen horseshoe, the left side of the upside-down U flaring out a little. To the lower right of the cap, the leather straps and metal spur hang from another nail. The cap and crop hang over several pieces of overlapping paper affixed or tacked to the door. The front-most poster has black text printed against a white background. “OAKLEY” appears in all caps across the top like a headline. In smaller letters below it reads, “Race Track” and then “Six Great Races.” Horizontal lines beneath that suggest more text, but it is illegible. The bottom of the poster is ripped, creating an irregular edge. The poster overlaps and mostly obscures a picture of a dark horse against a parchment-brown background. Corners and bits of yellow paper or board, sky-blue fragments, and a peach-colored ticket with the numbers “762” and “112” are affixed around and under the poster. Just beneath and to our right of these overlapping papers, nails pin the four corners of a kelly-green sign that has otherwise been ripped away, the white torn edge showing against the green paper. The black letter “S” is printed in the upper right. The wood door that creates the background for these objects is worn, especially along the vertical edges of the boards. The wood is cracked and split in some areas, and a few bent, rusty nails are partially driven into the wood. Two scrolling hinges to our left are mottled with rust brown and black. Each hinge ends in a three-lobed clover shape. The bottom hinge is broken about two-thirds of the way across the arm, so the end hangs down from the nail in the clover. A keyhole near the right edge of the composition is surrounded by a gold-colored plate. An illegible scrap of a newspaper column is pasted to the door near the top right corner of the composition, and two pieces of paper seem to be tucked into the edge of the painting. A ticket with the numbers “471” printed in large red numerals and again in smaller black numbers, and the letter “H” is tucked into the right edge, near the four corners of the green poster. Finally, the corner of a folded and wrinkled piece of sapphire-blue paper, perhaps an envelope, is tucked in at the bottom center.