Sedbury, with jockey up, and a greyhound in an extensive wooded landscape, with two country houses beyond

Sedbury was a chestnut racehorse bred in 1734 by Andrew Wilkinson of Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, by Mr Croft's Old Partner out of Lord D'Arcy's famous Old Montague Mare. Mr Wilkinson sold Sedbury when a yearling to Mr Mann of the same town. He first ran in 1738, winning twenty guineas at Hambleton, beating Lord Halifax's No Name amongst others. Mr Mann then sold him at the end of 1739 to a Mr Martindale of St. James's Street, London, and the jockey in the present work is shown wearing his colours. Sedbury’s trainer, and usual jockey, was James Larkin Senior, although he would have been older than the man shown in this picture.

Between 1738 and 1744 Sedbury won nineteen of his twenty-four races, of which his two best were for King's Plates at Newmarket in 1740 and 1741. Both times he beat a particularly fine racehorse called Elephant. In 1744, Sedbury's last season, he won 60 guineas at Newmarket, defeating the Duke of Ancaster's Brisk. He retired to stud at Leeming Lane in Yorkshire and died circa 1759. Sedbury is described in Picks Register as 'a horse of exquisite beauty, of great justness of shape and form, and was indisputably the best horse of his size at the time of his running'.

Seymour is known to have painted Sedbury on at least four other occasions. There are various engravings of the present composition, published by the likes of James Roberts, Thomas Butler, Thomas Spencer and T. Bradford among others as one of several popular series of racehorses in the 1740s-1750s. We are grateful to Richard Wills for pointing out that there are four other works by Seymour, broadly of the same format and of similar style to the present picture, two depicting Flying Childers, one Sedbury, and one an unidentified horse. One of those showing Flying Childers is signed and dated 1732, yet the group was quite possibly painted in the 1740s, portraying famous racehorses that in some cases were of an earlier generation, an idea George Stubbs would famously expand upon with his hugely ambitious, albeit incomplete, Turf Review series. It is also possible that the backgrounds in this group of pictures by Seymour may be by another hand.