Art: Ex-Huckster at the Races

Big-city admen, in their wistful moments, sometimes talk of giving up the chase for cigarette accounts, moving deep into the country, and dividing their time between gentleman farming and “self-expression.”

Vaughn Flannery did more than dream about it. Ten years ago, at 43, he threw up his job as art director (and partner) of Manhattan’s booming Young & Rubicam, and hit out for the Maryland horse country. Scoffing friends predicted that he would soon be back at the old Manhattan treadmill. He was back last week, but not on a treadmill: a big 57th Street gallery was showing 31 of Vaughn Flannery’s coolly colored paintings of horses and racing scenes, and mighty nice they were.

Flannery’s horseflesh is several stables away from the stiffly noble equines of the classic English and American horse-painter schools. Flannery horses are just characters in a series of mobile sketches of racing life—from a newborn foal shakily standing in its stall to the slow circling of two-year-olds going to the post at Saratoga. His subtly patterned scenes are the work of a man who lives close to his subjects.

Flannery grew up in a house where an easel and the American Stud Book were both handy. His father, a Kentuckian, remembered his son’s birth as the year when Plaudit won the Kentucky Derby (1898). Flannery’s mother, an amateur painter, encouraged him to study art. But young Vaughn decided that he wanted to make money. When he had enough of it, he moved his wife and two children to his 307-acre Maryland farm. He runs a profitable “nursery” business, boarding brood mares about to foal. “What’s more,” says Artist Flannery, “I get all the free models I want.”

His attitude towards his painting is unpretentious: ‘Tm not trying to be an artist or anything like that. You get an awful lot of precious implications when a painter wants to be called an artist.”

Whenever someone asks him why he switched from advertising to painting, he just says, “Because I like it.” It is fellows like Flannery who keep admen feeling wistful.