François Robichon de La Guérinière
Guérinière
François Robichon de La Guérinière (1688–1751) was a French riding master who had a profound effect on accepted methods for horse training, and one of the most influential writers on the art of dressage.
History
De La Guérinière was born on 8 May 1688 at Essay, near Alençon in Normandy, France. He spent most of his early years in Normandy. Although his brother Pierre des Brosses de La Guérinière directed the Académie d'équitation in Caen, originally established in 1594 by another French master, Antoine de Pluvinel, de La Guérinière's most influential instructor was de Vendeuil.
In 1715, de La Guérinière received his diploma as an écuyer du roi, and he began as a director of an equestrian academy in Paris, a position which he held for 15 years and which earned him a reputation as an instructor and rider. This led to an appointment by the Grand écuyer de France, Prince Charles of Lorraine, as Directeur du Manège des Tuileries in 1730. He held the position of Equerry to Louis XIV until his death in 1751.
Riding theories
De La Guérinière is credited for the invention of the shoulder-in, which he called the "alpha and omega of all exercises"; he was the first to describe it. His treatise L'École de Cavalerie, "The School of Horsemanship", which was published in parts between 1729 and 1731, and as a complete work in 1733, is an important book on the training of the horse, detailing equitation, veterinary treatment, and general horsemanship. This book has become an important text for the Spanish Riding School of Vienna.
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This entry incorporates text from “François Robichon de La Guérinière” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.