How a bespoke equine portrait is commissioned: scale, timeline and process, by equine artist Gabrielle Benot, painter of Raging Torrent.
Commissions start at $5,000. Where a particular painting lands above that depends on size and complexity, and a large piece runs to $50,000. Expect two to four months. Send whatever photographs you have, including old ones and badly lit ones, as long as they are not pixelated.
What follows covers what those photographs need to show, how to get the scale right, what to ask before you commit, and what changes when the horse has already died.
You almost certainly already have what a painter needs
The usual worry is that the photographs are not good enough. They generally are. Any photograph can be worked from, including old ones and badly lit ones, as long as it is not pixelated, which is the one thing that cannot be recovered. A soft snapshot from years ago holds more usable information than most people expect. An image forwarded and saved and forwarded again until the edges have gone to mush holds almost none.
So the first thing to do is not to go out and shoot anything. It is to gather what already exists, send more than feels reasonable, and let the artist choose. The photograph you are least proud of is often the one that catches the way he held his head.
If you are going out to take new ones, the single thing worth avoiding is bright sun. Hard midday light flattens a dark coat into a shape with no detail in it and drops a shadow across exactly the part of the face that matters. An overcast day is better photographic weather than a beautiful one, and the dapples in a grey only show properly in flat light.
Something you can do this week. Put every photograph of him you can find into one folder and look at it as a set rather than one at a time. You will see at once whether you have him from the near side, the off side, straight on, standing square, and moving. That folder is the brief, and it is worth more than any description you could write.
If he is inclined to come and investigate the camera, have somebody hold him and be thoroughly tiresome about the headcollar, so it is not in the way of the shot you end up loving.
The thing people regret is almost always scale
Nobody has ever stood in front of a finished commission and wished it were smaller. A great many people wish they had gone bigger.
A horse's head at close to life size has a presence in a room that a smaller version simply does not, because you read it the way you read a face. Drop below that and it starts to become a picture of a horse rather than the horse. Go above it, to something that fills a wall, and it stops being a picture at all and becomes architectural.
That is not an argument for the largest thing you can afford. A smaller painting in a study, at the height you sit, can be the more personal object. It is an argument for choosing the size deliberately instead of defaulting to whatever sounded reasonable on the telephone.
The free version of this decision. Cut the proposed dimensions out of brown paper or newspaper, tape the shape to the wall where the painting will hang, and leave it there for two days. Walk past it. Sit under it. Almost everybody who does this comes back asking for something larger, and they come back certain rather than hopeful.
Photograph that wall with the paper on it and send it to the artist. It says more about the light in the room, the height of the ceiling and what else is competing for attention than any measurement, and all three change how a painting should be built.
What to ask before you commit
Ask to see a portrait of a horse the artist did not already know. Anyone can paint a convincing likeness of an animal they see every day. Working from another person's photographs of another person's horse is the harder skill, and it is the one you are buying.
Ask what they do about a marking or a conformation quirk that photographs badly. The answer tells you whether they are painting the horse or painting a horse.
Ask how many rounds of changes are included, and get the answer in writing. Not because artists are slippery, but because a few tweaks means something different to each of you, and it is far easier to agree before the paint is on.
And ask what it costs and how long it takes. Two painters of similar standing can be a factor of ten apart for the same canvas, so a range on somebody else's website tells you very little about the person you are actually talking to. The figures at the top of this page are this studio's own.
A good artist will sometimes tell you not to do it
If what you want is an exact record of how a horse looked on a particular day, a very good photographer may serve you better and cost less. A painting is an interpretation. That is its whole value and also its whole risk.
It is worth saying this out loud at the start. If you want something close to the photograph, say so. If you want the animal as he felt rather than as he measured, say that instead. Most disappointment in commissioned work comes from those two things never being separated.
When the horse has already died
A great many of these commissions are for horses who are gone, and if that is why you are reading this, it is not an unusual thing to ask for and you do not need to explain yourself.
Practically, it changes less than people expect, because the artist works from photographs either way. What you lose is the chance to go back and look at something again. Which means the photographs you already have are now the whole record, so send all of them, including the technically poor ones. A badly lit snapshot that catches the way he held his head is worth more than a well composed one that does not.
Give yourself permission to take your time choosing. There is no deadline on this, whatever it feels like.
About the artist
Gabrielle Benot is a contemporary artist based in California who paints in her own Guscio technique, a method she named from the Italian for shell and developed by layering pigment on metal substrates. She is from Latvia and trained in fashion design in Copenhagen at Margrethe Skolen.
She has painted five thoroughbreds for their owners, four of them out of Doug O'Neill's barn, along with a commissioned portrait of Secretariat. Among the five is Raging Torrent, a two-time Grade 1 winner who took the Malibu Stakes and the Hill 'n' Dale Metropolitan Handicap and is now at stud at Lane's End. Oceanic ran in the 2022 Breeders' Cup Turf Sprint. Ah Jeez, So There She Was and Don't Bring Crazy are each multiple graded stakes placed in Equibase's record.
Commissions and questions go through gabriellebenot.com/contact. Existing work is at shop.gabriellebenot.com.