Equestrian Art: The Early Writings (1951-1956) of Master Nuno Oliveira

From 1951 to 1956, Nuno Oliveira wrote about sixty articles concerning horses and riding in two Portuguese magazines, "Diana" from 1951 to 1954, then "Vida Rural" until the end of 1956.

The articles he wrote in the 1950s, are succinct, most around 1000 words long, never start from a lofty view of horse riding. Most of these early writings are models of that great equestrian intelligence which was one of the hallmarks of his personality. Until now, they were neither collected in a single volume nor fully translated into English.

Xenophon Press has worked carefully with Nuno Oliveira's daughter, Pureza Oliveira and with key bilingual students to complete the English translation from the original Portuguese texts.

The articles address a wide variety of topics including, for example, diagonal and lateral effects, the fine tuning of aids, the horse's memory, etc. These articles are true gems of equestrian literature, testifying to the immense capacity for synthesis that Oliveira demonstrated with regard to the theoretical debates of the discipline.

We present here for the first time ever, a complete and new English translation of these 60 articles, embellished with photographs of the same years.

Together with the companion volume to this book, Equestrian Art: The Collected Later Works by Master Nuno Oliveira (Collector's Edition), we now present, for the first time in English, in a set of two volumes, the complete written works of one of the greatest equestrian masters of the twentieth century.