When I visited the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Sussex last year, I was keen to see the heavy horses at work. I was in luck: a team of three Percherons were pulling a harrow at the far side of the site. There was a lady at the side of the field to answer questions (and probably to dissuade onlookers from getting in the way of the workers). She told us that the horses do all of the field work on the museum’s farm, and that they are very fit and healthy as a consequence.
I spent most of my time there producing two A4 pages of fragmentary sketches:
… and only took a couple of photographs as an afterthought. There wasn’t really enough information in my quick sketches to make a “proper” detailed drawing, so I resorted to the photographs for this drawing on paper.
“Harrowing”, ink on paper, picture area 8×24″ mounted in black card to 11×27″.
