Horses
This landscape painting portrays a rural scene with two horses, one of them feeding from a nose bag. Horses were fed from a nose bag rather than directly from the ground as this reduced waste and cut the risk of horses eating something that would make them ill. It also stopped a horse stealing another’s food.
Richard Beavis worked in watercolour as well as oils, specialising in rural and atmospheric coastal scenes. He was born in Exmouth in 1824 but spent most of his childhood in Sidmouth, where he learnt to draw and built up a strong affinity with the sea. Encouraged by his friends, he moved to London in 1846 and enrolled as a student at the Government School of Design at Somerset House, which housed the Royal Academy and the Society of Antiquaries.
After exhibiting several times at the British Institution, he obtained admission in 1862 to the Royal Academy of two pictures – A Mountain Rill and Fishermen Picking Up Wreck At Sea. The artistic and financial success of these works was sufficient to justify him devoting himself to purely artistic production and he exhibited over three hundred works in the principal London exhibitions.
This painting was also known as The Ploughman’s Rest when it featured in a Christie’s catalogue.
