Richard Stone Reeves, Painter of Racehorses, Is Dead at 85
NY Times
Richard Stone Reeves, a prominent portrait painter whose subjects were all extremely beautiful if a trifle on the horsey side, died on Friday in Greenport, N.Y. Mr. Reeves, widely considered one of the premier equestrian artists in the world, was 85 and made his home in Greenport.
Mr. Reeves’s daughter, Nina Stone Reeves, confirmed the death.
Commissioned by leading owners and breeders around the world, Mr. Reeves painted more than a thousand of the finest thoroughbreds in a career that began in the late 1940’s. His roster of subjects read like a Who’s Who of horseflesh: Affirmed, Buckpasser, Cigar, Dark Star, Forego, Genuine Risk, John Henry, Kelso, Nijinsky II, Northern Dancer, Ruffian, Seattle Slew, Secretariat, Spectacular Bid.
His list of patrons, equally impressive, included W. Averell Harriman, Paul Mellon, Allaire duPont, Harry Guggenheim and the Aga Khan. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan presented Queen Elizabeth II with a special edition of Mr. Reeves’s book “Decade of Champions” (1980), which included a commissioned watercolor by him of the queen’s champion racehorse Dunfermline.
Done in oil on canvas, Mr. Reeves’s paintings were neo-Romantic in style, setting sleek-coated muscular horses against pastoral backgrounds. Sometimes he included the jockey in his gleaming silks, and over the course of his career Mr. Reeves captured some of the best riders in the world, among them Ron Turcotte, Lester Piggott and Bill Shoemaker.
