POINT OF VIEW
During the 52 years I have enjoyed being a pro- fessional horse trainer and coach, I regularly studied the classic equestrian books and tried to understand them. As I am re-reading those seminal books with a fresh eye, I am discover- ing hidden advice that can prove very useful to dedicated trainers.
cussed by the elegant retired cavalry officers who rode at our riding club near Paris, France. In 1965, at fifteen, I read Baucher (Hilda Nelson’s Fran- çois Baucher, the Man and his Method provides a wonderful translation), Faverot de Ker- brech’s Methodical Dressage of the Riding Horse and La Mé- thode de Haute école de Raabe by General Decarpentry. I must confess that they did not help me much in a practi- cal way at the time, but they
M François Baucher (1796–1873)
encouraged my imagination to think of better ways to ride the problematic horses I was familiar with. That same year, my mentor and friend Georges Caubet
took me to Michel Henriquet’s indoor manège to watch him ride his Lusitano stallion Andaluz and introduced me to Nuno Oliveira’s first book, Reflections on Equestrian Art. I read it many times and it sounded good. I got a vague idea of the equestrian concepts Hen- riquet was trying his hardest to learn and demonstrate to French riders who had no idea of what they were looking at, except it was very pleas- ant to watch. I had already ridden in show- jumping, eventing and amateur
Faverot de Kerbrech (1837–1905)
races (steeplechases), but dressage was another thing alto- gether. Mostly, I galloped in the national forest around my house on the school horses of the riding club next door.
70 January/February 2019
y first job at 16 was retraining a dozen off-the-track racehorses and I needed guidance. As a teenager, I spent my allowance on the authors I heard dis-
By JP Giacomini
Hidden Wisdom from the Old Masters
They were retired Standardbreds, Thoroughbreds, un-pa- pered Spanish horses, Polish spotted horses saved from the slaughterhouse, Barbs from Morocco and Algeria retired from the Spahi regiments (French light cavalry from North Africa) and a few Selle Français and Anglo-Arabs owned by boarders. It was a lot of fun and we had none of the safety concerns prevalent today. A good seat, acquired by count- less hours of riding and jumping without stirrups, tough instructors and silly games of taking your saddle off while riding around (the stuff we see nowadays performed by mounted police officers), were understood as the best safe- ty you could rely on. If somebody fell off, he/she got to buy a round for everybody who witnessed it. Those were sim- pler times!
Discovering Dressage in Print The year after watching Michel Henriquet ride, I spent a summer month in Lisbon learning dressage on Nuno Olivei- ra’s wonderful little school horses. During the lunch break between lessons, I avidly read books from his exceptional library, but he insisted “books have to percolate down from your head to your seat, or they have no value.” Oliveira himself had a short formal education in his teen-
age years with his much older relative, Joaquim de Miranda, who was a follower of James Fillis, an Anglo-French trainer and author who headed the Russian Cavalry School in the early twentieth century and whose best-known work is Prin- ciples of Dressage and Equi- tation. Miranda was the last equerry of the royal Por- tuguese court that ended with the Republican revolu- tion of 1910. The Portuguese royal
equestrian tradition (the “Real Picaria”) was codified around a book by Manoel Carlos d’Andrade (Luz da liberal, e nobre arte da caval- laria, published in 1790) that described the “art of the Mar- quis of Marialva.” This matters because that book represents the epitome of the baroque training format and Miranda’s work was rooted in classical ideas improved by the Baucher school of thought and further improved by Fillis. Many of Miranda’s students were young ladies riding sidesaddle and
James Fillis (1834–1913)
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