Oil Painting Ariostar Winning At Royal Ascot In The Manner Of Lionel Edwards

Historic Royal Ascot Horse Racing Oil Painting – Ariostar Winning the Granville Stakes, 1947 – In the Manner of Lionel Edwards 🎩

📌 Subject & Medium
This is an original mid–late 20th-century oil on canvas board, dating from around the 1970s, now approaching half a century old. The subject is the racehorse Ariostar, shown winning the Granville Stakes at Royal Ascot on 19th June 1947. Painted with a strong narrative sense and in the manner of Lionel Edwards, it belongs firmly to the classic British sporting tradition while retaining the freshness and immediacy of a more modern eye.
The medium is traditional oil applied to a prepared canvas board, giving a stable, slightly textured surface that has aged attractively over the years. The colours have mellowed into a rich, harmonious palette, with enough brightness in the jockey’s silks and the ladies’ dresses to keep the scene lively and engaging.

🖌️ Composition & Technique
The composition is built around a dramatic diagonal running from the lower foreground up toward the distant grandstands and line of trees. The racecourse forms a sweeping green avenue that carries the viewer’s eye straight to the winning post, just as the crowd’s attention would be in reality. Ariostar is placed at the head of the field, clearly in front by several lengths, and the receding size of the other horses cleverly emphasises her dominance.
In the foreground, rails and viewing boxes anchor the scene and create the sensation of looking down from an elevated vantage point, perhaps from the Royal Enclosure or a private box. The crowd is evoked through carefully placed touches of colour: dark coats and grey top hats suggest gentlemen, while flashes of red, blue, yellow and green indicate the ladies’ summer dresses and hats. This impressionistic handling suggests hundreds of separate figures without painting each one in detail, giving a lively, bustling sense of excitement and noise.

The horses and jockeys are painted with more precise, controlled brushwork. Heads, legs and tack are clearly defined, conveying speed, balance and correct movement. The sky is softly modulated in creams, greys and pale blue, evoking an English summer day of shifting cloud rather than unbroken sunshine. Overall, the technique combines accuracy with painterly freedom: enough detail to satisfy the racing enthusiast, enough spontaneity to appeal to lovers of impressionist sporting art.

🐎 About the Horse and Race
Ariostar was a bay filly foaled in 1945, by the noted stallion Solario out of Co-Star. She enjoyed a brief but high-quality career on the Turf and is best remembered for her narrow defeat in the 1948 1000 Guineas at Newmarket, where she was beaten only a head in a dramatic Classic finish. That performance places her firmly among the better fillies of her generation.
According to the original inscription on the reverse, this painting records Ariostar’s victory in the Granville Stakes at Royal Ascot on 19th June 1947, during her two-year-old season. The artist has captured the decisive moment as she surges past the winning post with daylight visible between her and the chasing pack. For the racing historian, the subject offers a tangible connection to post-war Ascot form; for the decorative buyer, it provides a compelling story. Being able to say that the horse in the painting later finished second in the 1000 Guineas immediately lifts it above the level of a generic racing scene.

👩‍🎨 About the Artist
The work is signed by Gladys Harrison, a 20th-century British artist whose output appears to have been relatively small and is only now beginning to be documented. This Royal Ascot painting is one of the best-recorded examples of her work and shows a confident understanding of both racing subject matter and crowd composition.
Her style here is clearly in the manner of Lionel Edwards. As with Edwards, there is a strong emphasis on the correctness of the horses’ movement and on authentic racing detail, while the surrounding crowd and landscape are treated more loosely to give atmosphere and life. The combination of observational accuracy and painterly vigour places the picture comfortably in the mid-20th-century British sporting tradition, while still retaining an individual voice. For collectors, it has the charm of a “discovery” piece: a named artist, not over-exposed on the market, with a very attractive and decorative subject.

🕰️ Historical Significance
Royal Ascot is one of Britain’s great racing and social institutions, founded in the early 18th century and long associated with the Royal Family. By 1947, Britain was emerging from the hardships of the Second World War, and great race meetings such as Ascot symbolised continuity, tradition and a welcome return to sociability and style.
This painting therefore captures more than just a winning horse. It offers a snapshot of British social history: top hats and morning coats, colourful summer dresses, packed stands and the carefully laid-out racecourse, all set against the mood of post-war optimism. To hang this picture is to open a window onto Royal Ascot in the late 1940s, with all the glamour, excitement and ceremony that entails.

✍️ Signed
The painting is signed in the lower right corner in a neat, legible script, “Gladys Harrison”. On the reverse, a handwritten label states: “Ariostar winning the Granville Stakes Royal Ascot June 19th 1947.” Together, the front signature and the verso inscription confirm the subject, race and authorship, and these details are echoed in later professional auction cataloguing.

🖼 Framed
The work is presented in its traditional gilt frame, which suits the image perfectly. The moulding has a gentle profile that draws the eye inward, and the warm gold tone enhances both the greens of the turf and the varied colours of the figures and flags. The frame helps give the piece the feel of something that might have hung for decades in a trainer’s office, a racecourse committee room or a country-house study. A hanging thread is attached to the back, allowing it to be placed straight on the wall with ease.

📏 Dimensions Framed:
Height: 54 cm
Width: 69 cm
Depth: 3.3 cm

Condition report:

This is an excellent, versatile size: impressive enough to make a statement above a desk, fireplace or sideboard, yet easy to accommodate in a home office, hallway, landing or snug.