Spots before the eyes

Knabstruppers, They’re Baroque-shaped (well, some of them are) and spotty. What’s not to like?

Having said that, I don’t have many of them – yet. In fact until recently I only had one – this old Britains Black Beauty which I repainted, and customised to have a permanent bridle. My main reason for painting her spotty was to try and ‘visually enhance’ her conformation a bit (!) Then, as a spotted horse with a ‘European’ body shape, I felt she’d do best as a Knabstrupper.  I named her Gilda as I had a vague idea it was a Danish name.

At the time I didn’t really know where to start in finding her a pedigree from European sources, so I turned to the members of IPABRA. Alice, the owner of All Hallows Equestrian Centre, was active there, and had a large sire and dam list of European breeds including the more obscure ones. They were all meticulously researched with pedigrees going back to real horses, so I felt very confident in asking her to recommend two of her models as parents. As the model was not noticeably one type or the other, we gave her one more ‘Baroque-type’ parent and one more ‘sport-type’. I admit she’s not the greatest model out there, but she’s recently been doing quite well in ridden classes.

However, I recently got another Knabstrupper, by a slightly roundabout route! About 2 years ago someone posted a ‘Pay It Forward’ challenge on Facebook. It ran something like this: ‘I promise to send something hand-made during 2011 to the first 5 people who comment on this status and then share it themselves’. I thought this was a great idea to catalyse me into the many creative projects I had in mind, so I signed up for it.

One of the people who signed up to receive something from me was a Swedish collector, so I offered to paint a horse for her, and we agreed on a Knabstrupper, her favourite breed. Someone else kindly donated a Stone Chips Andalusian for me to paint, and so (near the end of 2011, I have to admit!) I created this little guy and sent him off.

About a month ago, I was casually browsing around on MH$P (not something I do that often of late) and was very surprised to see a group of minis for sale including my spotty horse! It turned out that his owner had decided to get out of mini-scale models and had sold him on, only for his next owner to make the same decision. When I contacted her she was delighted to sell him to me, and I was very pleased to be able to welcome him home. As you can imagine, he took quite a lot of time and effort (see below!), and I’m glad that I’ll now have the chance to show and breed from him.

So, he needed a pedigree, and now there seems to be more Knabstrupper source material on the Internet than there used to be. For example, the Danish society website has a very good illustrated page of stallions at stud, with a lot of pedigree on each horse when you click on his picture. OK, it’s in Danish, but you don’t really need to be able to speak the language to look at a picture, read the pedigree, and work out that “Født” means ‘foaling date’. The British website also has a stallions page, although obviously there aren’t so many stallions over here. Nevertheless, it was from here that I ended up finding my stallion’s pedigree. Looking at the imported stallion Tornado af Knabstrup, I thought he looked quite similar to my model and was stated to be of Baroque type. His pedigree also looked interesting, as his website notes that he is ‘one of the very few Knabstruppers with 100% purebred status in 4th generation’. What this means is that, as outcrosses to various other breeds are allowed by the Knabstrupper registry, many registered Knabstruppers actually have parents, grandparents and so on, of other breeds. I believe this is becoming more and more common as the current market favours the sport-horse type, so breeds such as the Danish Warmblood, Trakehner, Frederiksborg and Oldenburg are being used. I like the idea of a stallion carrying the older Knabstrupper bloodlines, and as Tornado is still quite young, I decided that the simplest thing was to make my model a full brother to him.

He still needs a name, so I am playing with putting various words into Google Translate and seeing if I like the Danish version! I was going to go with one of the words for ‘magician’ or ‘wizard’, but then again, ‘orkan’ (hurricane) is nice and easy to remember (and to spell!) and is similar to Tornado, so I haven’t quite made my mind up yet.

Meanwhile there’s another horse in the pipeline… I was after a Chips Andy to repaint for quite a while and ended up getting several, by various means. One of them has had his head and neck turned to the left, which I really like, and I want to keep him as another stallion. As he stood there in his undercoat, I was convinced that he was asking to be buckskin blanket, which led me into a search as to whether the Cream dilution (responsible for buckskin) exists in Knabstruppers.

The consensus seems to be that it doesn’t, but that it is possible to introduce it via the permitted outcrosses. I found internet references to a buckskin colt bred this way who had existed in the UK for a while but unfortunately died young; furthermore I wasn’t quite sure whether his dam was of an approved breed or not. Another possible way to pedigree my horse might have been from the well-known Gestut Falkenhorst, putting a Knabstrupper mare to one of their dilute TB or Oldenburg stallions. 

Yet another way would have been to use Frederiksborg blood, as Cream is found in that breed. Lesli Kathman tipped me off about the fascinating Finnish site Sukuposti, where, in the Gallery, you can browse horses of a particular breed by using the ‘valitse rotu’ menu, and then see the pedigree of each by clicking on their photo and then their name. It is very good for some of the more obscure European breeds who might not appear elsewhere! This brought up a number of dilute Frederiksborg mares who could be used as a dam for my buckskin horse.

However, I’m now tending to move away from this idea, for two reasons. Firstly, a buckskin-based Knabstrupper would require documentation in the showring, setting out all the above justification for his colour. Secondly, any horse along these lines would be largely sporthorse or TB, whereas my horse is more the Baroque type. So I’m wondering if perhaps the horse is asking to be chestnut blanket? I really like the look of this fellow, so perhaps a son of his out of a spotted mare? Watch this space!

European excellence

Oh dear, posts this year are proving even more erratic than last. I won't bore you with the full list of excuses, but one is that I was organising a live show, which was held in April. Having held a show for British breeds last year, this year I thought we would go for European breeds.

There was a wide range of In Hand classes catering for all European breeds and for many makes of model. However, as usual, I was most impressed by the quality and ingenuity of the performance entries on display. So I thought I would share a few of them with you here.

Here's a lovely Akhal-Teke costume entry by Suna Akiah:

while here's a medieval French knight by Ann-Marie Potrell:

This Spanish lady by Laura Ibbitt was Reserve to Reserve Ridden Champion:

and here are two lovely Spanish Riding School entries, by Catriona Burt and Lynne Howberry-Gale respectively:

This really cute milk-float turnout was by Suna Akiah:

and lastly, Lynne Howberry-Gale's dressage entry, MHEC Danzig, was the Performance Champion:

Vive la France!

At last, a post about pedigrees!

It occurs to me that at some stage, I’m going to have used all the obvious place-related phrases as post titles for this blog. However, until then…

 I first became dimly aware of the Haras Nationaux (French National Stud network) by reading about it in the 1960s and 70s Riding magazines which were given me by an older friend and which I avidly digested during my childhood. In fact, my enthusiasm for horse breeding and pedigrees may well be largely traceable to those magazines, and I still have them in my loft. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to visit two branches of the Studs while on holiday in France, and I’ve also used their website for tracing pedigrees, and just for general browsing.

Now, I only visit the website every 6 months or so, and every time I do they appear to have changed it, so the following is not an exhaustive guide to how to use it now or in the future. However, there currently appear to be 3 main ways of finding information on individual horses on it.

The first is from this page ('espace etalons'), where you can search for all the stallions which the National Stud is currently standing, by breed. From the name of each individual, you can go to a page which gives more details including his pedigree and, often, a photo. The second is this page ('info chevaux'), which searches a much bigger database  known as the SIRE database. This includes stallions, mares and geldings, including some of unknown breed/parentage, many in private ownership as well as those owned by the Haras Nationaux, and some older/deceased horses. I think it may in fact include all those who are part of some kind of national microchipping scheme. The drawback here, of course, is that you need to know a horse’s name in order to get started. Also, if there are many horses of that name, there doesn't seem to be a way of refining the search unless you are a paying member of the site, so you have to trawl through them all. However, if you do find the horse you want, and it is a purebred, you can access several generations of pedigree from here.

The third method is from the homepage: click on the map showing the regions of France and it takes you to a page of information on the Haras locations within that region. This is very useful if you are planning to visit one of the studs, as it will give you all the relevant visiting details. If you select one of the locations listed as a Centre Technique (CTP), you can then access (bottom right of the page) a list of all the stallions currently standing there, as well as lists of stallions whose frozen or chilled semen is available. These latter lists are often a lot more extensive and so are another good way of finding horses. From each individual horse’s record on here, you can select to ‘en savoir encore plus sur sa généalogie’ and that will take you to a page giving not only a 3-generation pedigree, but also lists of the other produce of the horses in the pedigree, and a list of the stallion’s own produce. All this is a useful way to find individuals who might be used as parents.

Of course, I should have stated at the outset that you do need a smattering of French to find your way around, but once you get used to the vocabulary, it’s really not that difficult. A few useful basics are étalon (stallion), jument (mare, although they also seem to use femelle), hongre (gelding) and poulain (foal). Trait means draught, so a cheval de trait is a draught horse, while ane is a donkey. With regard to colours, noir, bai, brun and gris are fairly self-explanatory. Chestnut is alezan, and roan is rouanne, although I recently discovered that aubere can be chestnut roan (Gris rouanne is just grey – in the same way that grey TBs can still be registered as roan in the UK and US). Isabelle can be buckskin or dun,  also possibly palomino,. Crin lavées means flaxen, although be aware that in some breeds, for example the Comtois, alezan crin lavées (flaxen chestnut) can actually be silver bay, and bai crin lavées almost certainly is. I’ve also seen at least one instance of a brown horse being described as noir pangaré, while a black horse was bai foncé, so it does pay always to look at the picture if there is one!

Here’s one of the models I have pedigreed with the help of this site: 

 

whom I won as a MECS trophy in 2005. Prior to this, I already had a set of details for a chestnut roan Norman Cob stallion, Prince, given to me by Morgan Haberman of the US. This was a son of her stallion L’Inspecteur, who I believe was a bit of star on the US model scene in his day. Roan is a rare colour in Norman Cobs, in fact it may even have died out in the live horse population and you will not often find it listed as a possible colour on breed websites; but go back a bit and it’s possible to find real, registered examples who were listed as roan. I checked out Prince’s pedigree and his grand-dam is listed as roan, which is good enough for me.

Prince himself though was foaled in 1981 so was a bit too old to use as details for a showing model, so I decided to make my horse a son of his. I therefore needed a dam. While on holiday in 2004 I had visited the Haras du Pin in Normandy, and seen a few Norman Cobs including this handsome specimen, Herquemoulin:

 

(We saw him and I made a note of the name on his stable door just before we were shoo’ed outside – we were only supposed to be in the stables while on the official tour, apparently).  I looked him up on the Haras website and decided to use his dam, Tapette – she was bay, but I knew that she was capable of producing chestnut with a chestnut-based stallion. As she was foaled in 1985, she was plenty old enough to produce a foal older than Herquemoulin, so I decided to make my stallion a year older. Since virtually all French equines, of any breed, seem to use an alphabetical naming system, I needed a name beginning with G. A quick search through a French dictionary threw up the word ‘garance’ which means the colour of something dyed with madder. Madder is a pinky-red colour, so this seemed a perfect name for my horse!

Addressing realism for a moment, I admit that it’s hardly realistic that a mare belonging to a French stud would have been covered by a stallion in the UK imported from the US, when there are so many home-grown Norman Cobs in France to choose from. However, I didn’t see many other ways of finding a real Norman Cob mare, and one could always argue that the breeder sent her across the Channel or obtained some shipped semen in order to keep the rare roan colour going!

The second horse for which I used the site was this Percheron:

 

With his heavy build, long mane, and more feather than is seen on British or American examples, I thought he looked more like the French type of Percheron. Also he is greying out from black, so I wanted one of his parents to be black. As his sire I therefore chose Lime George, whom I had liked when I had seen him at the British Percheron Society Show a few years ago: 

 

Lime George was bred from two-imported French-bred horses, and I was able to use the Haras website to find several generations of pedigree for his dam, Cayenne. Unfortunately I have come to a halt with his sire, Bouton d’Or, as there is more than one registered Percheron stallion of this name, and I don’t know which one is Lime George’s sire!

My model also needed a dam, and for this I chose a real British Percheron mare called Hales Uni. She was pictured as a prize-winning filly in the catalogue of the Percheron Society breed show which I attended, and then a few years later I was delighted to see her on the cover of Heavy Horse World magazine as the supreme equine champion of the Royal Show 2004 – the first time a heavy horse had ever won this honour.  At that time Uni was nine and in foal for the first time, so there were a number of ‘free’ years to choose from for my stallion.

Uni’s dam was Hales Juno, most of whose pedigree I could trace from an earlier, 1980s show catalogue which I owned, or from the All Breed Database. Uni’s sire Ryan’s Day Granitdier (registered name Ryan Day’s Granitdier) eluded me for a long time, despite being an influential sire among British Percherons. Eventually however he also turned up on All Breed. As he was imported from Canada, my stallion, whom I named Hales Paulinus, has a nice mixture of French, Canadian and British lines.

I hope this has been a useful introduction to finding pedigrees for the French breeds, using a resource that you may not have known about. I’ll be happy to try and answer specific questions from anyone who contacts me.

Make-Do and Mend

… that’s mostly what’s been going on here this last weekend. A little mending, re-touching and refurbishing of models and set-ups that had been damaged.

First up was a hunting scene which I first put together several years ago. It’s made of tiny white metal figures which I bought as a kit at a model railway fair, painted up, and arranged on a suitable base. I took it to one or two shows, but then somehow it got damaged and ended up in my ‘customising drawer’ awaiting repairs. It knocked about in the bottom of the drawer for two or three years, sustaining further damage and being generally unloved, before resurfacing recently. With my British Breeds Live Show coming up in a couple of weeks, I realised it was high time to tidy it up so I could take it to the show.

By this time, all the figures bar three of the hounds had become detached from the base, all were coated in the talcum powder which I had used to make the grass look frosty, and several had small rubs to the paintwork. So firstly, they all got a dunk in a bowl of water and a little rub over with a cotton-bud, to shift the talc. After that, it was a matter of touching up the paintwork wherever they had been damaged, or where it was still looking a little dull. Finally I reattached them all to the base using superglue. Here’s the result:

It’ll be entering the ‘Working Horse/Scene’ class at my live show in a couple of weeks, and I’ll let you know how it gets on. Incidentally, for pedigree assigners, most of these horses were painted with the bright idea of using them as ‘bodies’ for my retired ‘paper racehorse’ geldings, but I still haven’t got round to officially writing down who is who. Maybe that’s the next step…

Anyway, while I was on a roll, I decided it was time to tackle the little queue of horses awaiting treatment for broken legs, smashed ears, and so on. A few of them had come to grief, either at live shows or hurling themselves out of the display cabinet at home, and again had been waiting for quite some time. So I carried on with the glue, the paint, and a little sandpaper where necessary, and pretty soon they were all on their feet again:

L-R: H-R Shetland repainted by me to Welsh; H-R mule repainted by me; Breyer SM Arab Mare reworked by me; Breyer SM Quarter Horse Stallion repainted by Jackie Radwanski.  It’s true that two, if not three of them will not be live show quality again – the leg repairs are still visible because I haven’t taken the time to rub down the mend, refill if necessary, etc – but at least they can stand on the shelf and look pretty again.

The other thing I was doing this weekend was trying to decide on a breed for this guy:

He’s a fairly simple repaint that I bought at a show last year, and probably not going to be a big winner, but I’m a sucker for a roan and I like him. With regard to breed, the first thing that came to mind when I acquired him was Dutch Draught, because he reminded me in pose of a picture of a Dutch Draught in a book of mine. However, having shown him once as this, the judge pointed out to me that really he is not heavy enough for that, and the more photos I look at, the more I agree with her – Dutch Draughts are humungous.

The ‘obvious’ choice, if you like, is probably Ardennais, and perhaps I should just go with that; but he keeps telling me that his name is Alois, or possibly Albrecht, both of which are German. German heavy horse breeds are not terribly well-known outside their native land, so researching them required a bit of Googling in more than one language. The more I look, the more the Rhenish Kaltblut seems to fit the bill: an attractive horse of the right build, often occurring in bay roan, and reasonably well-documented on line. In particular, many of the photos of this breed seem to show it moving with a good deal of action, as this model is. My one reservation is that perhaps he has too much feather for a Rhenish, and from this point of view an Ardennais would be better; but amount of feather seems to vary between individuals in both breeds.

Comments welcome – watch this space while I make my mind up, and then set about looking for a pedigree!

Apologies for the bits’n’pieces nature of this post – it’s how I am at the moment. Normal service with proper pedigree assignment posts will be resumed once the live show is over.

Oh, Vienna!

I promised you Lipizzaners this time and here they are, but I must confess: they, and Iberian breeds in general, were not really an interest of mine until relatively recently. Then about four years ago, a couple of things happened to change that.

The first was that I read an absolutely wonderful children’s book called The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson. It’s the story of an orphan girl called Annika, growing up in Vienna in about the year 1900, and I would recommend it to anyone. To me, it has everything that the best childrens’ stories should have. Animals, including the stallions of the Spanish Riding School, play an important role in the book, and this was what first began to fire my romantic imagination. I began thinking that it would be nice to have some model Lipizzaners, possibly named after some of the book’s characters.

The second thing was that in 2007, my husband and I were lucky enough to be able to leave our children with friends and spend the long Easter weekend together in Vienna. We had a fantastic time, seeing many of the major sights, and of course I was determined not to go to Vienna without visiting the Spanish Riding School. Fortunately they have a very good website, available in English as well as German, on which I was able to find plenty of information to plan our visit in advance.

I quickly decided that it was too expensive to see a full performance, and in any case I don’t think there was one scheduled for the days of our visit. However, I found that on most days it’s possible to see the young stallions doing their morning exercise and training. This takes place to music, inside the same famous riding-hall where the performances are held, and it seemed to be the perfect way to get a flavour of the school.

It was indeed a fascinating experience, and a privilege to be able to spend two hours watching the young horses (not the ones who currently take part in the performances) being put through their paces. Most of the training was flat work and fairly basic, just walk, trot and canter in different degrees of collection, on different leads, and so on, with some practice of passage and piaffe. The riders were very quiet and sympathetic, and whenever a horse had successfully worked in collection for a while, he would then be allowed to walk on a loose rein and stretch his neck out again. Towards the end, one horse did a little practice of levade and courbette. When the exercise was over, each horse received lots of pats and a little edible treat from his rider’s back pocket!

One is not supposed to take photographs inside the riding-hall, but my husband managed to sneak a few, so here’s one just to give you a flavour:

In the afternoon we were able to go on a tour of the Spanish Riding School’s museum and stables. The museum contained interesting items on the history of the School and the Lipizzaner breed, including beautiful paintings, and information on the horses’ brands which I assiduously copied down! There were also historic costumes and saddlery worn in earlier times. Unfortunately we were not able to tour the main stables as they were being refurbished at the time, but we did see the stable yard, with a few white heads poking out over the doors:

And also the tack room, where I was pleased to note several fresh white hairs adhering to the saddle cloths!:

As you can imagine, this also boosted my enthusiasm for the Lipizzaner breed, and so when a little later I bought a Stone Chips white ‘Andalusian’ on eBay, he became my first Lipizzaner. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of variation of type within the breed, so that quite a variety of models are (I think!) suitable. All Lippizaner stallions are named with their founding sire line (Siglavy, Favory, Pluto, Neapolitano, Maestoso, Conversano, and the two later additions Tulipan and Incitato) first, followed by the name of their dam. Thus finding a name and a pedigree for this chap were one and the same exercise!

Again, the Spanish Riding School Website came to the rescue. Among the pages giving information of their stud at Piber is one which links to lists of horses for sale, and from each horse one can link to a document showing a 5-generation pedigree. A little browsing around the various horses on the site (which will, of course, vary over time!) can thus give a picture of which horses were producing offspring at Piber at a certain date, and from that, one can select parents.

I chose my horse’s parents on two criteria. One was how much I liked the look of the horse on the sales page which came from that line. However, as most of these are young horses and the Lipizzaner is a slow-maturing breed, it was often difficult to base much of an opinion on the photo. The other was simply how the name sounded in combination! After a little playing about I came up with a name and pedigree for my chap: Siglavy Biondella, by Siglavy Galanta out of Biondella.

As this model is sold as an Andalusian, I felt that when I took a photo of him for showing purposes, I wanted to emphasise his Lipizzaner-ness as much as possible. Happily I was able to print off one of our photos of the stable yard in Vienna and position him ‘in’ it. It’s a shame I couldn’t really replicate the paved floor, but nevertheless I was pretty pleased with the result:

As I mentioned last time, I was responsible for helping Helen Cooke’s mum to sell off Helen’s models after her death. A few of them have ‘called to me’ so strongly that I have ended up buying them for myself! One of these was an Animal Artistry ‘Tagus’ in fleabitten grey, which I think she had actually won as a MECS Championships prize.

Helen had named this model ‘Casablanca’ and had been showing him as a part-Andalusian, but being already quite ill when she got him, had not managed to assign a pedigree to him. I wasn’t particularly happy with the ‘part-Andalusian’ designation and decided I would prefer to have him as another Lipizzaner. As Helen had never found him parents and not shown him a great deal, I felt that this change was acceptable. I did however want to keep the name Casablanca, partly as a tribute to Helen and partly just because I liked it!

Luckily, the name has quite a Lippizaner-sounding ‘feel’ to it, even though of course it is not, but I thought with the addition of one of the stallion line names, it would sound OK. I went back to the pedigrees on the Piber Stud website and chose Favory Graina as the sire. For the dam, I knew I would be unable to find a real mare named Casablanca, and in fact there does not even seem to be a mare line with names beginning with ‘C’ so in the end I just chose the mare Allora, as a fairly ‘bland’-sounding name, available in the right year. So, I have not followed the breed naming rules with this horse, but even so I think Favory Casablanca sounds quite nice.

So now I have two Lipizzaner stallions and still no mares – watch this space, and I might eventually get some!