THOMAS STRINGER

Rainbow, a bay racehorse, held by a groom.

Thomas Stringer was born in the small town of Knutsford in Cheshire, where he established a career as an equine portraitist for the local gentry.  Stringer had a flair for creating elegant and inventive compositions; he was able to produce harmonic relationships between figures that suggest an innate feeling for proportion, though he was not afraid to experiment with unconventional arrangements.

There is some confusion regarding the artist’s name, occasionally thought to be ‘Francis’.  Gratefully, Marjorie Carney offers a probable explanation for this, stating: “Thomas Stringer signed his work with his initials, and a cursive, italic capital ‘T’ can easily be confused with an ‘F’."*   Similarly, this ambiguity might lead to confusing Stringer’s work with that of Francis Sartorius.  However, in addition to a marked stylistic difference, Sartorius did not use initials to sign his work.

* Carney, Marjorie. ‘Thomas Stringer (1722-1790)’. The British Sporting Art Trust Essay. No. 37 (winter 1999).

BACK