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Ralph Hedley R.B.A.
Shoeing the bay mare
1883
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Alternative titles
Shoeing a refractory horse in the stocks Central Exchange Art Gallery
1883
Shoeing Horse in Stocks
Executor’s book, 1913, 264
The Old Forge, Benwell

oil on canvas
660 x 940 mm
SIGNED b.r.c. R Hedley

EXHIBITED 

Central Exchange Art Gallery, 
Grainger Street, Newcastle 1883 (151)

Loan Exhibition of Works
by Ralph Hedley R.B.A.
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 1938

Loan Exhibition of Works
by Ralph Hedley R.B.A.
Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead
1938-39 (4)

PUBLIC COLLECTION 

Laing Art Gallery,
Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Reference TWCMS : B1849
Given by Mrs. S.S. Simms, 1945)

 

Ralph Hedley Archive Reference
1883-W012

Shoeing the bay mare

The figure on the right, wearing brown velvet jacket and trousers is Tom Irwin who worked at Ralph Hedley’s woodcarving workshop. He claimed that he posed for Shoeing a refractory horse in the stocks in a letter to Hedley’s son Roger in 1938. Tom Irwin was about 17 when the picture was painted.

His younger brother John wore similar clothes when he posed for a string of paintings by Ralph Hedley between 1882 and 1885, including The last in the market (1885) and The ballad seller, the Black Gate, Newcastle (1884). In all these paintings John Irwin wore a brown velvet jacket, like the one worn by the older boy in the in Shoeing a refractory horse in the stocks (1883).

The Irwin family arrived in Newcastle around 1880 from a farm in Bolton le Sands, Lancashire, and Thomas Irwin recalled that Ralph Hedley admired the distinctive clothes that they brought with them:

" When we came from the country where we had been farming, we brought several quaint articles of clothing, caps, clogs, baskets etc, which proved invaluable to your father’ work, and... which we know were much appreciated by him. "