“Horse was the first word that I uttered as a child,” Joan MacIntyre Dove told a reporter in 2005. She grew up watching the horses that pulled the milk wagons, bought an American Saddlebred at eighteen, and sold her first commission — of that same breed — the same year. It paid thirty-five dollars, enough to make her quit commercial art for horse painting. By her own account she then starved for twenty years.
She trained at Temple University and at art school in Phoenix, and worked for decades out of California, driving to her subjects: racehorses at Santa Anita, commissions for the Wrigleys, for a Getty son, for Telly Savalas and Howard Koch. She painted Decidedly and Gato Del Sol, Kentucky Derby winners twenty years apart.
In 2001 she moved to the Carolina foothills for the plainest reason a horse painter could have — in California the horses were a long drive away, and in Tryon they were already there. She rode Morgans, Arabs and Thoroughbreds, drove carriages, followed the Goodwin Hounds and the Green Creek Hounds, and painted four of the Block House Steeplechase posters, giving the first away to the Tryon Hunt Club for a fundraiser. The hunt in these pieces is one she had ridden.
The murals this press reproduces she painted in 2006, in Landrum, a few miles from home.
