FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
SIDELINES OCTOBER 2014 79
“Argentine Polo Brothers”
24 x 36 oil on canvas
Leland Neff
Photo by Rebecca Baldridge
“It was an experienced horse,” he recalls, “and it taught me how
to ride.” The next family stop was New England, where Leland
competed against adults in Western pleasure classes because
there weren’t any divisions for kids. He regularly earned ribbons
and trophies, and says to this day, “There isn’t a horse I can’t just
jump on and ride.”
His artistic talents began early, with his first art show when he
was 6 in his mother’s hometown of Conesus, New York. By the
age of 13, his landscape paintings were hanging in California
galleries.
He graduated magna cum laude from New York’s Pratt Institute
and the college honored him with a one-man show. “Most
artists don’t bother with a college education, but I thought it was
important,” he said.
From there, he went to New York City to earn a living as a fashion
illustrator. “The same agent who represented me as an illustrator
also represented famous photographers, like Skrebenski who
shot Estee Lauder ads, and when I found out that photographers
got paid ten times as much, I learned how to use a camera.”
He shot high fashion ads for New York City department stores
like Bergdorf Goodman, Burberry, Bloomingdale’s and Barney’s,
and fashion spreads for Estee Lauder, Clairol and Revlon. It was
a life that kept him on jet planes from New York to Paris and Milan,
and away from horses.
On a fateful day, a bike ride took him to the Hampton Classic
where he experienced an epiphany, thinking:
This iswhere I belong
.
He rented a farmhouse and barn in exchange for designing a line
of wallpapers, and made a living doing commissioned paintings of
horses and riders, just as Stubbs and Munnings before him.
When he wasn’t in the Hamptons, he was at the Saratoga
racetrack painting jockeys and racehorses. Notable among his
racehorse paintings is an iconic likeness of Rachel Alexandra, the
filly who won the 2009 Preakness.
In traveling to Saratoga, he found and fell in love with the farm
where he lives today. “It hadn’t sold,” he said, “because of the way
it was divided.” Leland purchased the 150-acre farm, where he
paints, teaches painting classes, raises organic vegetables and
chickens and splits his own firewood.
He also has a goal of breeding horses, based on Jigi, short for
Irish Jig, a 17-hand-plus Irish sport horse. She’s half Thoroughbred,
and he plans to breed her to Thoroughbred stallions.
He got Jigi while visiting a cousin in Maryland who breeds
Arabians.
The cousin bought Jigi so her husband would have a horse to
ride, but the spouse and Jigi didn’t get along, and Leland was
happy to take the mare.
“When we got home, I pointed her at a four-foot fence, and she
just popped over it,” he said. “I figured she’d had some jumper
training, but when I contacted the people who’d trained her, I
found she had no jumping training at all. She was just a natural.”
Aside from Jigi, there are six other horses on the farm, three of
them pony stallions. One of the pony stallions, Fortissimo, is the
