It is worth adding to the portraits of Shire Horses foaled during the last decades of the eighteenth century one more showing a pair whose colour betrays them as belonging to a variety closely allied to that last noticed. The picture facing page 58 shows two horses named Pirate and Outlaw, and was painted in 1810 by an artist named J. C. Zeitter; the owner of the work was Mr. Andrew McCullum, and it was engraved by J. Egan.
These particulars we obtain from an inscription on the frame of the work, which is our only source of information. Having an eye to the accessories in the background, we infer that Pirate and Outlaw were, like Garrard’s horse, the property of a brewer; both before and after this period views of well-known breweries were favourite subjects with some of our best animal painters, who found excellent reason for their preference in the magnificent teams of dray horses of which private firms were so proud. The ownership of, and work performed by, these horses, are however of no special importance; the interest of the picture, apart from the substance and strength of the animals, lies in the colour. This curious parti-colour is by no means uncommon in the Shires reared in the Fen country; in the middle of the present century Mr. Colvin, of Pishobury, Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, had a breed of Shire piebalds on his Home Farm. Mr. Charles Marsters, of Saddlebow, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, possessed a celebrated stallion, “England’s Wonder,” foaled in 1871; this horse was the sire of good animals, but many of them horses of odd colours. To this day there is a tendency to breed animals with white legs, white markings and odd colours.
THE SHIRE HORSE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
It may be of interest to see how the east country Shire appeared in the eyes of a very competent judge of horseflesh about the time
PIRATE AND OUTLAW (1810).
PLOUGH TEAMS OF SHIRE HORSES. Bred by B. B. Colvin, Esq., of Pishiobury Park, Harlow, Essex, about 1844-1855.
(Drawn by P. Palfrey, from a Photograph.)