Some clues and a studio tour

The Clinkypaloosa Project

Sarah provided a few clues about our Clinkypaloosa project in her recent newsletter ("Magic Swords and Black Swans"). This is what she said:

1. The teaser photo she showed was of a medallion.
2. It is not a Blackberry Lane or a Minkiewicz Studios production piece.
3. This is one part of the project. 

Up until now, the project has been in Sarah's hands. Now that I am doing some of my part, it seems appropriate that I offer a clue of my own. Sarah said the secret wasn't about what this was, but about its purpose. With that in mind... 

The answer is in the name.

A Studio Tour

If you follow me on social media, you know that our new home in Michigan is surrounded by natural beauty. It sits on more than four acres of preserved wetlands, and the immediate area around the house was where the previous owner—a master gardener—enjoyed her hobby. I post a lot of pictures like this one!

The scent of these Korean Spice Viburnum is the first thing you notice when you step outside.

However, the real attraction with the new place was that I would finally be able to create separate work areas for the different parts of making ceramic horses. Materials used in casting and glazing cannot contaminate one another. When I had only one dedicated working space, it was necessary to turn it over in order to change tasks. Now I have a total of four spaces, two that are "flex" spaces and two used exclusively for studio tasks. 

Since I have been working on the Peritia molds, I'll show the two spaces for those activities. 

Master Molding Station

I make master molds with polyurethane rubber using plaster "boards" for structural support. The curing time for the rubber (16 hours) means it occupies the area for a while, so it was the first task I wanted to move out of my everyday studio space. The new house had just the right place for it in the basement. 

In the corner of the basement, there is a counter. It's usually where we set out snacks and drinks when everyone gathers to play pool or ping pong. Most of the time, the counter sits empty, so leaving a molding project to cure isn't disruptive. That is what is happening in the next photo; the first piece of Peritia's mold is curing inside the clamped box.

The only downside is that the counter is standing height, which makes it hard for a small person (like me) to peer inside the mold box. That's why my portable ladder is there. It is one of my favorite purchases for the new house, which has a lot of high cabinets. If you look closely, you can see that it has "socks"! It came with cute little knitted booties to protect the floor. 

Could those be ears peering out?

There is a lot of crossover between the tools I use to make master molds and those needed to make plaster production molds, so those normally live in the Spider Room. I do keep the master mold inventory in the storage cabinets that line the wall to the left. When everything was in one room, the heat from the kiln tended to dry out the rubber bands. 

The Spider Room

The number one item on my wish list for the new house was a place (and the wiring) for a larger kiln. The new house has a large utility room in the basement that is perfect. The only problem was that it already had a massive, eight-legged occupant. My son worried that Shelob might be sensitive to fumes from the kiln, so he eventually relocated her. She—or maybe some equally large relatives—regularly returns. That's how the room got its name. At least visitors have some warning. 

It's a long, narrow room with cement floors. It came with storage shelves on the back wall and a sturdy workbench on the other end. Most importantly, it was easy to wire for a 240V outlet. (Setting up the kiln vents through the masonry wall is proving to be a little more involved.) 

One of my goals for the Spider Room is to have all of my mold-making, casting, and firing tools handy. I can't begin to count the number of hours I have lost over the years looking for things like my Ford Cup. That's the little black funnel hanging from the hook in the middle of the wall. It's a unique tool used for testing the viscosity of slip; nothing else does that job.

The studs already had a series of hooks. To that, we added shelves set inside the studs so I could take advantage of that space as well. If you look closely at the shelves with the glaze bottles, you can see two "Hammies". Sarah sculpts them to capture the expressions her husband, Chris (nicknamed Hammy), makes. Knowing how little Chris likes them, I think the yellow one is especially appropriate for the Spider Room. The blue one might as well have been Alan. "What do you mean the kiln needs to be vented through that cinderblock wall..."

At the other end of the room is the workbench. Like the counter for the master molds, the workbench was standing height. I didn't want to do all my casting and clay assembly standing on a ladder, so I had Alan cut the legs down to desk height. The deep grooves in the bare wood surface are difficult to clean, so we recently purchased a laminate countertop. 

(Cleaning the clay keeps the area from becoming dusty, which is important because clay contains silicates that can harm your lungs.) 

I love that the pattern on the (clearance rack) laminate top looks like spills of ceramic slip

The two containers with the green lids sitting on the left side of the bench are wet boxes. I plan to turn the long, shallow drawers under the bench into wet trays. I'll make a separate post about those and why they are useful. 

One last teaser

This is a peek at the project that required the larger kiln. She's traditional scale, so that gives you an idea of just how large the new kiln is. Depending on how I stilt her, I can fit 6-8 inside. Only one could fit in the old kiln, and only if she wasn't stilted, which meant she couldn't be glazed. 

That's a glimpse into the casting part. I haven't touched on the upstairs areas where I paint and glaze. I am still organizing that space, so I'll save it for later. In the meantime, keep an eye out for more teasers both here and in Sarah's newsletters.

Teaser - Clinkypaloosa 2026

 

Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig and I have a secret project we plan to unveil this fall at Clinkypaloosa. However, when someone plans a huge ceramic event in your backyard, the temptation to make things is pretty strong. 

So here is a teaser shot for my other not-so-secret Clinkypaloosa plans. 

To get the North Carolina house ready to sell, we converted the ceramic studio to an office and put the equipment, molds and bisques into storage.

Meanwhile, the new place was being outfitted for a larger kiln and more dedicated work spaces. 

The Carolina house sold last week, and I am almost finished getting everything here in Michigan up and running. My plan is to start working through some of the boxes. I can't say what will get pulled—I think I might be hard-pressed to find any specific thing at this point!—or what might get finished. I can say there are a lot of bisques, some of which haven't actually been seen yet as a finished custom glaze. I intend to work on a mix of both older molds and 'exotic' things. Whatever I manage to finish between now and October will be offered at Clinkypaloosa. 

I'll preview things as they come out of the kiln, so these really won't be a secret! 

Accuracy and documentation

Because I show a lot of uncommon breeds (and common breeds in uncommon colors), I am a fan of providing documentation. Creating short, informative cards so that a judge can better understand what my model is intended to portray is a challenge that I enjoy. 

Here is Lascaux, the model in the picture. 

Sarah Rose's Libretto painted by Kim Naumann

I show Lascaux (and other horses with Iberian type and appaloosa patterning) as Spanish Spotted Saddle Horses. Because that is a relatively new breed, and because the name is easily confused with the (very different!) Spotted Saddle Horse, providing documentation with the entry is important.

The Spotted Saddle Horse is an American gaited breed closely related to the Tennessee Walking Horse

 

Here is a close-up of Lascaux's documentation. It is typical of the documentation I use as a shower, and I prefer to see when I judge. It covers the very specific information I believe the judge needs to put the entry in context; it is not a book report on the breed.

I have written a lot of articles and a handful of books about breeds and colors over the years, but it never occurred to me to offer pre-made show documentation. I know that others have begun doing this, though, because entrants have told me they purchased their documentation. I learned this when I asked about incorrect information, and the answer was, "Oh, I did not write that." 

Usually, the errors are minor. I have joked that I am going to make custom Post-it notes that say, "This is not a silver," to attach to all the misidentified photos. Using sooty palomino or liver chestnut to illustrate the existence of silver dilutes in a breed is not going to change a placing—assuming, of course, that the breed really does have silver dilutes. 

Nope, not a silver!

Also not a silver.

More recently, however, I encountered documentation with errors that were on a completely different level. I am always hesitant to share details about negative situations because I do not believe publicly shaming someone is helpful. In this case, however, even I do not know who created the documentation. The exhibitor said she received it with the model. What I do know, though, is that it opened my eyes to the potential for a problem. 

That's because the phrase I usually hear right after "I did not write that" is "But the horse placed well using this at the last show."

As judges, we often take documentation at face value. After all, the whole point of laying down documents is to give a judge information that they might not already have. We expect almost encyclopedic knowledge from our judges, but there is so much out there. Documentation is supposed to help make the job more manageable. 

But what if judges cannot trust what is provided? What if exhibitors, or documentation writers, are just making things up? 

The "tobiano" Finnhorse

The model in question was a copy of Emilia Kurila's Ukko, painted in buckskin tobiano. He was being shown as a Finnhorse with documentation that claimed that the breed could be pinto-patterned. That is not untrue. Finnhorses sometimes have flashy white markings, and some do have belly spotting. There is even one instance of a dominant white stallion with a near-white phenotype. 

Vekselin Ihme, a near-white Finnhorse born from two chestnut parents

This is also the breed where splashed white was originally described in 1933. Although the color was thought to have been lost, it was later confirmed to be present in modern Finnhorses by testing. 

Illustration from the 1931 paper that first described splashed white

Finnhorses do not, however, have the gene for tobiano. The idea behind Valto Klemola's 1933 paper was that there were two different kinds of pinto, one dominant (what we now call tobiano) and one recessive (what we now call Splashed White 1). The form of splashed white present in the Finnhorses, Splashed White 1 (SW1), behaves in an incompletely dominant fashion. Horses with one copy look like they have 'ordinary markings', which is why Klemola thought of it as recessive. The horses looked like pintos when they had two copies of SW1. That was what made it different from the dominant (tobiano) pinto. 

Klemola used pictures of Scottish cart horses (the article was written while he was at the University of Edinburgh) to illustrate the tobiano pattern. The splashed white horses were descendants of the Finnhorse stallion Eversti. The whole point of the discovery was that there was a pinto pattern in Finnhorses that was not tobiano. 

Needless to say, finding a tobiano Finnhorse on the table was not something I expected. Finding documentation claiming this horse was proof was something else entirely. 

The documentation claimed that the horse in the picture was "Gold Charm," a Finnhorse stallion "standing at Blazing Colours Farm." None of these things are true. 

I recognized the horse. That's El Dorado Gold Charm. You can see this picture and more from the same photo shoot here. He is a registered American Saddlebred. I knew about him because one of his tobiano lines (he is homozygous) is a bit of a mystery. He's also buckskin, which (unlike palomino) is a little uncommon in his breed. 

The real eye-opener was the claim that he belonged to Blazing Colours Farm. A lot of model horse hobbyists might recognize that name. More would likely recognize it if they saw the stallion at the center of their logo. 

That is Sato, the 2011 BreyerFest Guest Horse. Blazing Colours breeds colorful Thoroughbreds and sport horses. They do not breed coldblooded trotting breeds like the Finnhorse. Interestingly enough, they do have a cremello Thoroughbred stallion named El Dorado, but not Gold Charm. 

The documentation not only named the farm, but also provided a link. Because everything about the claims was throwing huge red flags, I did check the link. It was dead. (Most judges do not have access to the internet while judging, so do not do this on your documentation!)

The whole incident left me deeply uneasy. Horses with incorrect breed attributions have become increasingly common thanks to sites like Pinterest. What made this one unusual was the full-page backstory that went with its breed designation. I could not figure out how someone could mistakenly identify a buckskin tobiano Saddlebred stallion as a Finnhorse (a coldblooded trotting breed) owned by a famous Thoroughbred farm in Canada. 

I still do not know how the documentation came together, but I would like to urge entrants to check the accuracy of anything they did not personally create. As much as I dislike saying it, I would also recommend that judges not necessarily take papers next to entries at face value. At a time when what is real and what is not is harder than ever to determine, it doesn't hurt to be a little skeptical. 

NaMoPaiMo - Week 1

My friend Sarah sent this guy, Itza Hoot, to me. He was one of her 2024 retro vintage customs. Sarah makes a group of them for National Retro Vintage Month (NaReViMo). Sarah has been encouraging me to get playful. It is one way address the urge towards perfectionism that many of us grapple with when creating model horses. 

Her NaReViMo horses are supposed to be fun to make. They also have to be completed in a set amount of time. I looked at the goal (playfulness) and the constraints (small time investment) and decided that it sounded like a great fit for National Model Painting Month (NaMoPaiMo). 

The Idea

I wrote about splatter painting last summer. Roans created using this technique always remind me of my early days as a customizer. I do not have any of my own examples, but I still have one done by my friend, Judy Renee Pope. Judy and I were very active in a mini model club in the early 1980s, which is when she made Nejmet es Subh. 

When I saw Sarah's 2026 NaReViMo horse, Romper, I knew I wanted to try a retro-style splatter roan. 

Romper is a classic roan with a dark liver chestnut base color. I wanted the sort of heavily roaned sabino pattern that the Nejmet has, but with a dark chestnut base color similar to his. The result would be a model that captured some part of two good friends—Sarah and Judy—who were also big influences on my artistic life, a bit of nostalgia for simpler times, and a color variety that has captured my interest for decades. 

The Plan

I do a lot of things that seem excessive or fussy now, but are about making less work later. One of those things is creating a written plan. I haven't always done that. I got into the habit when I started working in earthenware. Ceramic underglaze is unforgiving, and for most of the process, you cannot touch it, so complex colors require a lot of planning. It has proven to be helpful for traditional painting, too. With all the distractions out there, my memory for what I used to create this or that color or effect isn't what it used to be! 

I also assembled my reference images. The pattern I was after was most like the Arabian mare FV Alarazzl Rose. I have a handful of similar Arabians and a few Welsh Ponies for reference, but I plan to reference pretty loosely. Splattering is unpredictable, and I don't want to get set on a particular idea too early. 

First steps

My preference is to prime the horse white, then do a base layer in acrylic craft paint that is close to the final color. While many artists disparage craft paint, I find that the chalky surface makes it ideal for applying other mediums. 

Because this horse will have extensive white markings, I will use a warm white for the face and legs. These will be masked when I base coat the body dark brown.

The airbrush is great for getting smooth, even coverage, but the downside is that building up a dark color often leaves an edge where the masking ends. Since the borders of the leg markings were going to fade into the roan pattern, I needed a way to soften the edge.

My solution was to wrap the very top of the legs with a bit of pipe cleaner before using Press N'Seal to mask off the lower leg. The adhesive on the wrap stuck well enough to the fiber to hold it all in place. I suspect I could have just as easily used a scrap of felt or fleece—anything soft that could fit under the wrap—but the pipe cleaner was handy.

I airbrushed a bit of pinking to the muzzle before masking it with liquid latex. I find it easier to visualize the face if the markings aren't stark white. Here she is after I wrapped her feet, but before I added the latex to the face. 

This is her after the brown acrylic was airbrushed over the body. I've reapplied the liquid masking to her face and wrapped her feet with tinted plastic wrap to keep those areas clean while I use oil paint to get the major shifts in her body color. 

That is where I will pick up next week. With luck, I will have her body color where I want it by the time I leave to judge at Sunset Coast!

Painting resources

There is a link on the list for the Czech-Moravian Belgian under the references for sooty colors, since very dark chestnuts are common.

I have posted a new page to the blog titled Resources for Painting References. Links to the blog pages appear in the upper right sidebar. 

My goal with the page is to provide some reliable sources for reference images. I have divided it into general color groups, although many of the links include images that would be useful across multiple categories.

I've selected resources that have numerous, high-quality images. For most artists, we are trying to get as much detail as possible, so clear lighting and a large size was important. For many of these, you will want to click through or right-click to get a larger image. Many of these are galleries or discussion board threads, so look for page navigation tabs to see all the photos.

This reference comes from a thread about Akhal-Tekes on the Russian-language discussion board, KoniClub.

I have also included many foreign language sites. For most of these, you will not need to understand the text, but using a browser like Google that automatically translates pages can be helpful. I also encourage readers to explore the website links further. For example, I have linked Christine Sutcliffe's lovely Flickr album from the 2024 Royal Highland Show under resources for greys. There are wonderful images of greys—and especially duns turning grey, like the pony below—in that album, but there are also previous years' shows in other albums if you navigate back to her main Flickr page.

I have only included a small (and, I must confess, randomly selected) portion of my own go-to resources. If you have any reliable sources you would like added, please feel free to contact me. 

The scourge of AI slop

Every equine artist I know collects reference pictures. My own collection numbers in the hundreds of thousands. I started collecting images in the late 1970s, cutting out magazine pictures and "relocating" my favorite horse libraries one xerox at a time. 

But the internet was a game-changer. That was when my reference collection went from several boxes of papers to a box of external hard drives. 

In the past, the biggest issue with using the internet to collect reference pictures was misidentified breeds or colors. That changed with generative AI. Now, realistic-looking photos can be fake. That is what the image at the top of this post is. Here it is with the original. 

That's the Arabian stallion Marwan Al Shaqab. Because he's a well-known horse, and that's one of the more recognizable images of him, quite a few people pointed out that this was an artificially generated image. 

That probably won't stop artists from painting models with patterns based on the image, or judging from encountering documentation showing that "pinto Arabians can look like this." Interesting photos spread through the model horse community. Trying to get the word out that one of them is misleading can be an uphill battle. 

Just ask me how many times I've talked about the horse on the left, and how often I still see his picture on documentation. No, he is not a buckskin silver. He is a cream-diluted horse turning grey. The horse on the right is a silver-diluted buckskin. 

Silver and cream interact, making the black areas of the horse look warm and brown (right) rather than cool and silver (left).

At least Alen's Smokey Bandit—the buckskin grey Tennessee Walking Horse—is a real horse. 

 At the moment, there are still things that tell someone when an image isn't a real horse. Probably the most consistent error is headgear. The programs do not recognize that there are two different groups of equipment—halters and bridles—so it tends to merge the two things. Even more telling, though, is that it cannot seem to distinguish bits from other metal hardware. Lead clips are likewise a mystery to it.

If the unrealistic appaloosa pattern wasn't instantly suspicious, the "snaffle bit as halter ring" is a good giveaway that this image is fake.

Generative AI struggles with pinto faces, and often substitutes "white grey with markings" in areas that would have pink skin.

But as AI-generated images get more sophisticated, artists—and anyone trying to evaluate realism in art —are going to face challenges. It will not be long before very convincing images, and even videos, will be out there. Eventually, the consistent "tells" will improve. 

Evaluating images

As AI-generated images become increasingly difficult to identify visually, how can artists avoid using misleading references? 

Here are my rules of thumb:

1. Professional-looking photos are usually marked by a photographer. Look for a signature or logo. Be on the lookout for partially removed watermarks; they are more common in AI images than you might expect. (See the first image on this post for an example.) 
   
   
2. Generally speaking, you want to see a clear connection between the horse pictured and the account posting the image. That might mean the poster is the owner, breeder, breed association, event, or photographer.
   
   
3. Look for motivation for sharing. Is the horse being offered for sale or promoted at stud? Is the owner sharing a recent success? Are they asking for input about color, ancestry, or breeding? Posts using AI images are often clearly trolling for engagement. (Responding to them is a great way to get the scammy "Forgive me, but I noticed how clever/pretty/interesting you were and just had to reach out..." replies.)
   
   
   
4. Look for a name. Owners and breeders usually identify their horses. Sometimes you'll need to find the original post to see this text. It may not be visible when viewing photos using the "media" tab.
   
   
5. Unless you are looking at historical photos, be somewhat cautious if you only find one image of a particular horse. 

Captions from AI images (left) often include emojis and hashtags. Captions for real horses (right) usually have identifying information.

Reliable images

Here is an example of an unusual pattern reference that checks all five "likely real" boxes. 

I should note that while this breed, the Freiberger, is known to have a dominant white mutation (W1), the expression of that pattern is typically all-white or near-white. There has also been an unusual splashed white Freiberger with a sabino-like pattern, though that horse was sterile.

This type of patterning, which falls within what I call the "patchy sabino" phenotype, is not something I have seen in W1 Freibergers—or any Freibergers to date.

However, the images are watermarked by the photographer (#1). The group where this first appeared, Freibergerpferde suchen (Seeking Freiberger Horses), is run by a non-profit that helps breeders find buyers (#2). The motivation for the post is, obviously, to sell the foal (#3). The foal's name, sire, and damsire are all listed in the description (#4). Finally, there are multiple images of what is clearly the same colt (#5). Those facts make this a much more reliable reference for painters than the image at the top of this post.

Collect from reliable sources

General interest horse groups on social media—and particularly Facebook—are some of the worst offenders for providing steady streams of fake images. If the group has the adjective "Beautiful" followed by a horse-related noun, or an adjective followed by "Stallions", or "Love" anywhere in the title, it's probably best to treat images there with a lot of skepticism. 

Facebook can still be a good source for reference images if you know where to look. What I look for are the following types of groups:

• Breed associations
• Breed appreciation sites (this one requires caution, especially for color breeds)
• Breeder pages
• Equine photographers
• Breed-specific color groups
• Breed history groups

I am also a big believer in looking beyond social media sites. Some of the best resources for reference images are auction catalogs, sales videos, and stallion directories, all of which are typically found on independent websites. 

A list of reliable image sources

Social media sites are a lot more likely to push AI-generated content into user's feeds. There are good resources for photos, but it takes some work to find them. With that in mind, I am assembling a list of reliable sources from the categories I've listed above. Once that is finished, the list will be added to the blog's "pages" list with the Horse Breed Reference List. 

More on body shape - Orlovs and Dutch Trotters

Count Orlov with a grey trotter, sometime identified as the Orlov foundation stallion Bars I. Painted in 1890 by Nikolai Sverchkov.

In the previous post, I wrote about the central myth in early 20th-century horse breeding, which was that all 'well-bred' horses have Eastern blood. Over time, this evolved into the idea that the Arabian—erroneously credited with the creation of the English Thoroughbred—was the primary "improver" of horse breeds. This led to the tendency to designate any Eastern horse as "Arabian" and then emphasize its influence. 

One of the most obvious examples of this is the Russian Orlov. Most descriptions of the breed will credit the Arabian stallion Smetanka as the founder of the breed. This painting almost always accompanies articles about Orlovs. 

Smetanka, believed to have been painted by Gavril Vasilyev in the late eighteenth century.

Smetanka was purchased in Turkey in 1774 and traveled by land for two years to Russia. He died the year after he arrived, leaving behind only five foals. Of those, the stallion Polkan was the most influential. Polkan's dam was a buckskin Danish mare from the Frederiksborg Stud.

The Frederiksborg Stud started in 1562 with Spanish and Neapolitan horses. These were later crossed with Turkish, Moroccan, and English horses. When Count Orlov imported the mares in the late 1700s, it is likely they still retained some of the original Spanish type. 

It is still possible to see the Spanish influence in Frode, a Frederiksborger foaled in 1855. There is another picture of him here. 

Polkan, who was half Arabian and half Frederikborger, produced a son that could more accurately be called the foundation sire of the Orlov Trotter. That was Bars (1784-1806). To establish his Khrenovsky Stud, Count Orlov linebred the descendants of Bars. 

The dam of Bars was an imported Dutch trotting mare: a hartraver. When responding to comments made by Walter Winans about the breed in the Live Stock Journal, the head of the Russian Agricultural Department described her in this way: 

The Orloff Trotter is not originated from several Arab stallions and Danish mares, as Mr. W. Winans means, because the first so-called ancestor of the Orloff Trotter—Bars—was a son of an Arab-Danish stallion out of an imported Friesian mare. The trotting qualities were inherited undoubtedly from the Friesian, or Flemish Hartraver (Trotter), and the influence of Friesian blood cannot be omitted.  (Live Stock Journal, June 1, 1917) 

Winans, whose article prompted the official to write, was an American residing in England, but who grew up in Russia. He is perhaps better known as the sculptor who discovered the famed Arabian stallion Skowronek in Poland and imported him. 

Skowronek, shown with his fifth (and best-known) owner, Lady Wentworth of Crabbet Park

Winans' interest in Arabians might explain why he focused on Smetanka. However, just as early Morgans didn't look like Thoroughbreds, the Orlovs of his day didn't look much like Arabians. It would be more accurate to say they looked like Friesians. Or rather, like our modern conception of a Friesian horse. 

Here is the Orlov stallion Varmik (f.1894), who was used at stud during the time Mr. Winans and the official from Russia were exchanging letters in the Live Stock Journal.  

Varmik was linebred to Bars. He also carried crosses to other Dutch mares used in the program.

Here is an Orlov mare from that time. Like Varmik, her body shape is distinctly Friesian-like. 

Here is Varmik's grandsire, Projda (f.1873). 

Even when Orlovs were grey, the body type is still very reminiscent of the Friesian. 

Gromadnyj (f. 1894), showing the heavy bone, feathered heels, and an overall shape similar to the previous examples.

It's not just the historical Orlovs that have this body type. It's not hard to find in modern Friesians. This lovely colt was offered at the 2023 yearling sale at the Moscow Stud Farm #1. Even at his young age, he has noticeable feathering on his heels. (Clicking on his picture will take you to the farm's website and a video showing his trot.)

Baget (f. 2022), a grey Orlov colt pictured as a yearling and offered at auction by Moscow Stud Farm #1.

So the Hartravers were Friesians? 

Does all this mean that the references to Dutch horses and "hartravers" were Friesians? 

The Orlov is one of the most thoroughly documented breeds from the 1700s. The amount of detail kept on the horses—particularly when it comes to the origins of the mares—is quite remarkable. However, this is all before there were breed registries. Terms like "Friesian" and "hartraver" could mean different things depending on who was speaking; there were no breed registries to regulate what was meant by a name. 

Tall, black horses of the modern Friesian type have a long history in the Netherlands. They were popular for use at funerals in Europe. Writing about the different classes of horses employed in London, one author referred to them as the "Black Brigade." 

The funeral horse hardly needs description. The breed has been the same for centuries. He stands about 16 hands... Altogether there are about 700 of these black horses in London. They are all Flemish, and come to us from the flats of Holland.

The illustration that accompanies the text shows horses of the Friesian type. 

Illustration from The Horse-World of London, published in 1893

The similarity between the funeral horses and the Orlovs was noted by a traveler writing for the Country Gentleman's Estate Book in 1913. 

A highly typical feature is the shape of the croup... which is seen in several Continental breeds, and most markedly so in the old unimproved Dutch breed of horses, of which so many representatives are used in this country as hearse horses at funerals. 

Based on the appearance of the descendants of Bars, it seems likely that the "Dutch trotter" mares used by Count Orlov were of Friesian type. They would not have qualified as Friesians today. For one thing, Bars' Dutch dam was grey. At least one other Dutch mare used at the stud was also grey. But in body shape, it is easy to imagine that they resembled a modern-day Friesian.

Does this mean Justin Morgan was a Friesian?

Bars was foaled just a few years before Justin Morgan. His dam was a "Dutch mare," and Justin Morgan (the man) always claimed his stallion was a "Dutch horse." Does that mean the foundation of the Morgan breed was a Friesian? 

No, it doesn't. Written accounts dating back centuries indicate that Dutch breeders were famed for producing strong trotters. They also produced more than one type of trotter. 

There is notable similarity in the body shape of the Orlovs and the Friesians, but neither resemble Morgans.  That's because there were two different sorts of Dutch trotting horses. Writers referring to Hartravers might be speaking of either type. 

Sultan, an East Friesian, and Varmik, an Orlov, illustrate the two different body shapes "hartravers" might have. (The two horses were born a year apart.)

A German writer, commenting on the horses of East Frisia in a 1879 government report, said they were like the "Harttrabers of neighboring Holland." 

That means there were three different "Dutch horses." There was a heavy draft, a tall black ceremonial carriage horse, and a fast-trotting coach horse. It seems likely that when Justin Morgan spoke of Dutch horses, he meant that last type. 

As blood horses became fashionable, especially in English-speaking countries, stallion promoters 'discovered' suitable back stories for their animals. The Hartravers were largely forgotten, which is why the information provided by Justin Morgan's son found few proponents. The only "Dutch" horses they knew about were the heavy drafters.