Ripley – The Household Cavalry Exhibition

We are delighted to be able to welcome this very special exhibition to Floors Castle by photographic artist Ripley who has created twelve large-scale portraits of the Household Cavalry. The stunning imagery features soldiers from The Life Guards and The Blues and Royals mounted on their horses and posed on buildings throughout London, overlooking the capital from Trafalgar Square to Canary Wharf. This exhibition will run between the 1st of May and 25th of June and is free to view with your Castle admission ticket or Annual Pass.

A boxed-set of these twelve portraits was the official Coronation Present to His Majesty King Charles III from his Household Cavalry. This was presented by Ripley and senior officers from the Household Cavalry to King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on 15 June 2023.

The limited edition prints are available to purchase, and range from large framed gallery pieces, a beautifully presented boxed-set, to smaller framed editions.

About the artist:

Ripley works with high resolution digital composite photography to create large-scale pieces.

Notable works include the portrait of ‘Estimate’ which Ripley created for Queen Elizabeth II in 2016, and portraits with racehorses such as ‘Pivotal’, ‘California Chrome’, ‘Big Bucks’, ‘Cracksman’, and the piece ‘Leopard Spotted Horse with Dalmatians in a Landscape’.

On working with the Household Cavalry:

“I had an idea back in 2012 when photographing from rooftops in New York to do an art piece with horses placed on rooftops overlooking an urban landscape. I started to formulate ideas which would involve The Household Cavalry, portraying them as ‘protectors’ “The Trusted Guardians” – overlooking London”.

How to turn that into reality was the next challenge, and through a chance meeting Ripley managed to present his work to the then Commanding Officer Col James Gaselee in 2016. “My presentation consisted of a portrait I had created of a racehorse overlooking an English landscape and a still from the James Bond film Skyfall”.

Permissions were granted, and it took a further year to arrange the photographic shoot at Hyde Park Barracks. This large production involved many soldiers with their horses in full ceremonial dress with lots of behind-the-scenes work from the grooms and farriers. It took another two years to complete all the photography in London, and two more years to construct the final pieces; these took between 200-300 hours per picture on the computer.

“My photography is more involved than placing one picture on top of another and involves shifts of focus throughout the image and other technical processes, just the background plate alone can be constructed from over twenty separate pictures”.