The horse: Introduction to The horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot

Welcome to our new exhibition on the horse, The Horse from Arabia to Royal Ascot, where we cover the fascinating 5,000 year journey of the horse from domestication to the present day. Now this piece you really have to look at, and you have to look at it more than once because its very simplicity hides its importance. It's a clay mould to make simple, cheap clay plaques. It dates from about 2,000 to 1,800 BC and it comes from Babylonia, from what is now southern Iraq. This is one of the earliest representations of a horse. The horse was domesticated about 3,500 BC in the steppes of Kazakhstan and southern Russia. If you look at how it's being ridden, the figure on the back, a young boy or a youth, is sitting far back on the romp of the animal. Now this is how you'd ride a donkey. So this is using an old technology and an old tradition to ride a new animal. An animal that's completely different, that's faster, has a better temperament, has more stamina and is going to completely supplant the donkey. What we have here is a wonderful work of art at the time of an Assyrian king called Ashurnasirpal II. What we can see is a bull hunt. We can see the king, the figure wearing the tall crown in the chariot. You can see beneath the horses a bull shot with arrows and this is the classic symbol of victory. It becomes a classic symbol of victory. Behind the vehicle, behind the chariot, you can see two horses, one rider and the spare horse with its rich trappings and its rich saddlecloth. This is probably the king's horse and this is the first indication that we're beginning to get that riding horses and riding, that it's appropriate for a king, for a monarch, which it hadn't been before. In this case we have a copy of George Stubbs' Anatomy of the Horse. Now what Singles dubs out as a portraitist of horses is his understanding of what is going on underneath the skin and for this work he spent 18 months dissecting the corpses of horses which he dragged up to his studio and in the most incredible detail in these etchings he reveals the workings of this wonderful animal and it's on this basis that Stubbs' fame was achieved. He really understood what he was looking at.