(American, 1818 - 1880)
Horse and Jockey at Belmont Driving Park, Lower Merion PA
Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches
Signed at lower right: “CHARLES HUMPHREYS”
Provenance: (all are the artist’s family) Louis Booth Humphreys; Louis Booth Humphreys II; Donald Humphreys; Ralph Humphreys; Dale Plummer
Belmont Driving Park was built c. 1876 on a property called Price’s Field: the site where George Washington and his Continental Army encamped after crossing the Schuylkill River following the Battle of Brandywine. The club originally featured a single one-mile oval track and an elaborate clubhouse with a veranda for elite members. This work features the original clubhouse prior to the massive four-story addition which would eventually be constructed.
Humphreys painted a number of works relating to the club including Budd Doble Driving Goldsmith Maid at Belmont Driving Park (1876, National Gallery of Art) and Frank Bower Driving a Pair (after 1874, private collection), which depicts the club president along the Schuylkill with the Second Girard Avenue Bridge and a portion of the Fairmount in the background.
About the Artist
(American, 1818 - 1880)
Charles Spencer Humphreys was born in Moorestown, where his father owned a general store. He surfaced in Camden in May 1837, where he placed a notice in a newspaper advertising himself as a house, sign, and ornamental painter. He shared a studio with his brother Richard Humphreys (1803–1872) from 1840 to 1844 and around that time married Caroline Fetters, with whom he had five children. The majority of Humphreys’s surviving works represent horses, the earliest known example being a lettered sign made for the Mansion House in Cape May (now the Cape May Historical Museum, Cape May Court House). He is thought to have decorated harnesses and breast straps for a Camden harness manufacturer and also painted wagons. Humphreys made paintings for the interior of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Camden in 1850. During the early 1850s he began to paint the subjects for which he became famous, portraits of specific racehorses posed against landscape backgrounds, or being driven by their owners or trainers. Humphreys retired to Long Branch, where he died. Horseracing enthusiasts held Humphreys’s work in high esteem. Some of his paintings were reproduced as color lithographs, and his portraits of horses and designs for carriages reportedly were included in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. His death was reported in both American and foreign newspapers.¹
Humphreys' work is represented in the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago
Notes
1. For biographical information on Humphreys, see Howard R. Kemble and Arthur D. Pierce, “A Distinguished Camden Artist,” The Bulletin of the Camden County Historical Society, vol. 4 (May 1961), pp. 141. For a recent discussion of his career, see Deborah Chotner, Julie Aronson, Sarah D. Cash, and Laurie Weitzenkorn, American Naive Paintings, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992), pp. 213–15.
