Tandem Shooting Cart

Book Description

New York: Henry T. Thomas, 1893. Heliotype. Very good condition apart from a mild crease in the lower right corner, some light soiling, and minor foxing in the margins. A few small losses in the top right corner of the sheet. 15 7/8 x 19 1/2 inches. 17 3/4 x 22 5/8 inches. A fine plate depicting Mr. Oliver H.P. Belmont's four-wheeled trap at Bellevue Avenue, Newport in August 1892, from the nineteenth-century publication 'Sporting Incidents'. Originally developed as a means of transport during the early days of fox hunting, tandem driving soon became a popular sport in its own right. It is a potentially dangerous sport that requires great skill, alertness and coordination in guiding a team of horses harnessed in procession to pull the cart in synchronicity. Steele explains that it is this challenge and the exhilarating element of risk involved that attracted many to the sport and led to the organization of many tandem clubs in late nineteenth-century America. Published during America's Gilded Age, 'Sporting Incidents' is a portfolio of elaborate illustrations depicting equine sporting events and accompanied by H. Milford Steele's eloquent descriptions of the history and status of these activities. It was primarily intended to glorify the increasingly fashionable sports of coaching, hunting, polo and steeple chasing. In its introduction, Colonel William Jay, a founding member of the Coaching Club, extolled the beneficial effect such activities had on the health, behaviour, and moral character of both participants and spectators and explained that the "aim of the artist in this book has been to reproduce such horses and carriages with such details of their equipment as may be useful as hints to those who need them, at the same time furnishing a standard of correctness in such matters."

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