Arabian Visions Magazine
Every time I look for a substantive article on Arabian horses online, I keep stumbling on something that was written in “Arabian Visions” like this informative article on the Perdue’s Rudalaro breeding program in Lamar, Colorado. I am a big fan of this program by the way, and especially of one of its flagship stallions: Fa Raad (Fa-Turf x Raada), whose famous picture is featured below.
Arabian Visions was the magazine R.J. Cadranell published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Michael Bowling and Rick Synowski contributed to it from time to time. I never got the chance to ask RJ why he stopped issuing it. I wish he – or somebody else – would resume publishing it. It was such a precious learning tool.
Check out Michael’s CMK website for a list of Arabian Visions articles and other good articles on the subject. That will make for a few dozen hours of good reading, for those who haven’t read these articles yet..
Thank you so much Edouard. It is very nice to be reminded of the Rudalaro breeding program, and the really wonderful horses who were produced by the Perdues.
I was the editor and publisher of Arabian Visions from 1991 to 2000. At some point during that time, I don’t remember exactly when, we merged it with the CMK Record — which as far as Record subscribers were concerned meant that an Arabian Visions subscription replaced their CMK Record subscriptions, and CMK Record ceased independent publication. Rick Synowski and Michael Bowling, who had both been part of the CMK Record staff, contributed articles to Arabian Visions and they were both steady advertisers in Arabian Visions, but neither one was ever a publisher.
Thanks for setting the “Record” straight, RJ.
Are back copies of this magazine available please? In particular I’m looking for the issue with the following article “Was Miraze Just a Mirage?” Arabian Visions, 16: 2 (Fall 1999): 17-1
and would appreciate any other information regarding Miraze. An update to a Michael Bowling article here http://cmkarabians.com/2011/01/10/mirage-790-lady-wentworths-loss-was-roger-selbys-gain/ mentions that Miraze may have been Mirage, and I’m curious to know how this conclusion was reached.
Briefly:
Among Miraze’s other foals registered in the General Stud Book (GSB), he is listed as the sire of 1924 and 1925 fillies (both unnamed in GSB) out of Rose of Persia. See General Stud Book vol. 26, page 1143.
In the 1990s, Michael Bowling and I found a 1926 letter from Herman Hoyer to W.R. Brown in which he described how Lady Wentworth had been unable to get her imported stallion *Mirage entered in the General Stud Book. Hoyer also noted, “Two pure-bred fillies (by the above mentioned ‘Mirage’ out of Rose of Persia) were only acccepted for the HALF bred Register of the Arab Horse Society.” Next we looked for Rose of Persia fillies in the Arab-Bred Register, where we found two in the 1925 edition: a 1924 ch. f. Zahra and a 1925 ch. f. Eastern Rose. The sire information for both fillies is “Mirage (imported Arab),” just as Hoyer said. However, these two fillies seem to be the same as the two entered in GSB as daughters of Miraze.
It dawned on us then that “Miraze” might simply be a fiction invented so that *Mirage foals could be registered in GSB, created by attaching the name “Miraze” to the GSB entry for Crabbet’s unnamed (and fate unknown) 1918 colt from *Nasik and Bereyda.
Miraze is the only Crabbet sire of the period not represented by a photo. Lady Wentworth never published a picture of him, nor has one surfaced in the 54 years since her death. Crabbet Stud employees Cecil Covey and Fred Rice left extensive published recollections of the Crabbet Stud, as did Lady Wentworth’s daughter Lady Anne Lytton. None of them mentioned Miraze, although all of Miraze’s contemporaries from the Crabbet stallion battery are in this record: Naufal, Hazzam, *Nureddin II, Rafeef, Shareer, *Rahal, Rasim, Skowronek, *Mirage, *Raswan, Naseem, and Raseem. There are even references to and a photo of Skowronek’s obscure son Iram. No visitor to Crabbet seems to have commented on Miraze. He is not listed in the 1924 Crabbet catalogue. He seems not to have existed outside of the stud book record.
Also, the chart of *Mirage descendants in Peter Upton’s The Arab Horse (1989) includes among the *Mirage get both Rix and Fayal.
Cecil Covey also gives [*]Mirage as the sire of Fayal, in one of his books of Crabbet photos. I believe this was the earliest published indication of the substitution, although I have seen *Mirage, complete with asterisk, given in at least one advertised pedigree from around 1960 as the sire of Rix–I’ve never know whether that was an error or something rather profound.