Peter Curling

Peter Curling was born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1955. His family moved to England in 1963, and he was educated at Stonyhurst College and then Millfield School, where he won an art scholarship. He began exhibiting young, showing work in Lambourn at around age fourteen, followed later by exhibitions in Dublin during Horse Show Week. From roughly 1972 to 1974 he studied under Signorina Simi in Florence, and he also briefly studied with the sculptor John Skeaping RA, though the exact year of that period is not documented.

Curling returned to live in Ireland in 1975 and went on to base himself in County Tipperary for more than thirty years, where he and his wife Louise ran a horse stud farm alongside his painting practice. His first solo show with the Tryon Gallery in London is dated to 1976 by some sources and his first London exhibition there to 1978 by others; either way, Tryon Gallery became his primary London outlet and continued to show his work regularly afterward. More recently he has also exhibited at Sladmore Gallery in London, though no single current exclusive gallery representative could be confirmed. His paintings have also been shown in Lexington, Saratoga, and New York, and he had a notably successful Dublin exhibition at Jorgensen Fine Art in 1992, followed by further Dublin shows in 2005 and 2019. He has exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London; one gallery biography describes him as an elected RHA member, though another source reports his RHA Annual Show submission was rejected, and this could not be resolved from available sources.

Curling is married, with three children and, per his own site, seven grandchildren. He and his wife moved from Tipperary to County Wicklow in 2023. He has also written, publishing the novel Drawing the Line. As of his own website, he was preparing a further exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin's Merrion Square, planned for November 2025. No source in the public record indicates that he has died; all available biographical and market listings describe him in the present tense as of late 2025.

Formal critical writing on Curling is limited outside the specialist equestrian and Irish art press, and no attributable critical characterization could be confirmed in the available record. His reputation rests less on museum or academic criticism and more on sustained commercial demand within the horse racing and country-life collecting world, and on his long, consistent exhibition history with the Tryon Gallery, Sladmore Gallery, and Irish venues over five decades.

Curling's auction footprint is small and concentrated in the Irish and equestrian art markets rather than the major international salerooms. The highest documented price found for his work is EUR 42,000, paid for Horse Fair at Goresbridge, County Kilkenny at Whyte's in Dublin on 6 June 2022. A separate result of USD 31,200 is reported for Around the Turn at a Sotheby's Arcade sale in New York, though the exact sale date and its standing relative to the euro results could not be confirmed. Other confirmed results include The Head Lad (EUR 30,000, de Veres, November 2013), The Home Turn, Limerick Junction (EUR 20,000, de Veres, November 2018), and Circles in the Snow (EUR 20,000, Whyte's, 26 September 2022). Results also appear periodically at Morgan O'Driscoll and James Adam's. Current gallery presence runs through historic association with the Tryon Gallery and more recent exhibitions at Sladmore Gallery, rather than through a single confirmed exclusive representative.

Curling has no catalogue raisonne and no documented authentication program, so provenance and dealer history carry extra weight when buying his work. His auction record is thin and drawn mostly from Irish sales houses, meaning any single high result, including the EUR 42,000 figure cited here, should be read as the best documented price found rather than a confirmed all-time worldwide record. His market is a genre market: demand is closely tied to racing and equestrian collectors rather than broad contemporary art demand, and current supply runs through historic association with the Tryon Gallery and more recent exhibitions at Sladmore Gallery rather than through a single confirmed exclusive representative.