Hi all!
Images removed, thanks all! I’ll have him tested. 
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To me he looks like a bay who has been clipped.
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He looks bay to me with the black points. He can’t be smoky black (which is a black horse carrying a the cream gene) unless he has a parent with the cream dilute gene, and he doesn’t look smoky black either. I don’t know if anything ever really came of the “At” color genetic research and I don’t think there is a test for it, but I think that it was supposed to explain the seal bay color and that might fit the description.
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Another vote for bay. The brown in his mane and tail are likely nutritional, especially given his weight.
Cute boy, what’s his breeding?
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I too vote for bay. His color is very much like my coming 9 year old’s color which is a very dark bay. His sire was a bright bay and his dam was a sooty buckskin. He has 2 full siblings that turned out the same color. They can look black in the winter except their muzzle color gives them away. When clipped they look very much like your horse. I also agree with the very cute horse comment.
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I read a book growing up (I looked at it obsessively b/c of the illustrations) called “The Color of Horses: The Scientific and Authoritative Identification of the Color of the Horse by Ben Green. [with 34 full-color paintings by Darol Dickinson]”
In that book, two shades of Brown were separate from the Bay section. Though I do know that others have lumped them together (including the Jockey Club). He even had a detailed drawing of the hair shaft and how it differed…
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It’s still genetically bay.
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Another cute plain bay Tb!
“My” barn is full of those 
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This horse looks bay to me! He’s very cute, have fun with him.
Regarding seal brown… it is a variation of bay, thought to be controlled by an allele on the agouti locus. Here’s some info for any color genetic nerds out there:
A possible third allele, ‘At’ has been recognised to explain the colour Seal Brown – a black horse with red/tan muzzle, flankfolds, breast, underarms, and inner-ears, which is also referred to as ‘Black & Tan’ due to similarities to that colour in dogs (Dobermans, Rottweilers etc). Seal-Brown horses are born with this coat colour pattern fully established, quite unlike Sooty Bay horses who are born with red foal coats and darkish legs but rapidly darken along the backline after 15 months old. Seal-Brown slots in between ‘ A’ & ‘a’ in dominance, and a laboratory in Arizona (Pet DNA Services) has spent many years working on proving the existence of this third Agouti allele for seal brown with some success, developing a genetic test for it. Other Genetics Laboratories lump Seal-Brown in with the various shades of Bay.
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Definitely bay, of some shade. The clipped Winter coat isn’t the best to determine shade, but going by his legs, phenotypically he looks “brown” which is still just a shade of bay (similar to “liver” is still just a shade of chestnut)
If he were red-based, his fetlocks and pasterns, and even his cannons, would have some hint of red, which I don’t see anywhere.
Lots of bays with a brown phenotype don’t have black points, so that’s genetics, rather than nutrition.
The At test was debunked and the founding company of that is out of business… The experts currently agree that brown is just a shade of bay, so no single allele responsible.
Smoky black can’t be determined visually. Black also has its shades, not all are BLACK black, even accounting for sun fading.
I wouldn’t rely on any color genetics book from more than maybe 10 years ago LOL Too much has been learned in recent history. Using the Jockey Club also doesn’t work, since they want to know what a horse looks like visually, regardless of the genetics. That’s why until recently, thanks to hard work of Gwendolyn Gregorio (RIP 
) they now recognize buckskin. Prior to that, all buckskins were bay, all palominos were chestnut, any genetically black horse with a hint of non-black was bay, and more.
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All true (and good points) - your horse is bay - with a sun-bleached forelock 
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Another vote for normal bay, with a clip and a faded forelock!
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Curious, what color do his papers say he is?
Oh about genetics. One of the big fun “what they know now” rabbit holes as a re-rider is how much we now know about color genetics and how much I learned from decent books as a kid was wrong. I’ve had two Pinto horses in my life, coincidentally not choice, and so was interested in the patterns all along.
I agree, don’t take as absolutely true any visual phenotype classifications and ID from the pre genetic era.
It’s also worth considering the breed. In TB it’s predominantly bay and chestnut. The likelihood is any brownish TB horse is a phenotype of one of those. Stock horses have more cream dilute so you could reasonably look for dun and smokey black there, but cream dilute TB are quite rare
Bay and black fade in all kinds of ways with sun, winter or summer coat, and nutrition. Other colors change quality too of course but stay recognizably red chestnut or palomino or grey.
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I still have that book. Love the artwork!
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The plainest of plain bay that ever existed. 
Just a little sun bleached and freshly clipped.
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It is WILD to me how much inaccurate information on color can be found in horse books!
People were just guessing.
I also found it fascinating that Britain distinguishes between black and colored Pintos as piebald and skewbald, but didn’t historically distinguish between tobiano and frame overo patterns, which is the major distinction in North America. As an adult I learned that frame overo mutated in North America out of horses of Spanish stock so wasn’t historically present in Britain. They had Tobiano and of course Sabino and Splash but those weren’t really seen as pinto when I was a kid. Splash is the pattern on Clydesdales. I think it’s called Blagdon in Britain.
None of this connects to the OP brown horse.
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I don’t know anything about color genetics, but I love your full chaps… 
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