Foxes and foxhounds, horses and horsemen, exhaustion and exaltation: the thrills of sporting art bring viewers close to the sounds, smells, and sights of a mostly bygone British pastime. The genre has its roots in the seventeenth century and continues to this day, but British sporting art—which looked closely at the rural leisure activities of the upper classes, particularly fox hunting—saw its apogee in the 18th and 19th centuries. Though sporting art varies widely across time periods and settings, one figure appears over and over again: the dog.
“Though dogs have been represented in art since ancient times, the tradition of modern dog painting is truly a British one,” says Alan Fausel, Adjunct Curator at the AKC Museum of the Dog in New York City. “It grows out of the English heritage of memorializing ancestors in order to confirm pedigree and breeding. It begins with the people themselves as sitters in portraits in the Renaissance and proceeds to horses and on to dogs in the 18th century. It also arises out of the English gentry’s passion for outdoor activities such as the fox hunt, coursing, and wing-shooting.”
Sporting art wasn’t merely an aesthetic artistic movement; it reflected deep sociopolitical sensibilities too. Giants of the genre—like Sir Alfred Munnings, legendary painter of horses—were moved to paint the British countryside in part because they believed this quiet, bucolic life was under threat. Against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and modernization, Munnings—who famously harbored a hatred for Modernism—focused on his beloved equine subject of choice, and the pastoral pleasures and sweeping landscapes of rural England.
In Continental Europe, Fausel explains, there is likewise a sporting art tradition, though not as strong as that of Britain. “In the 18th century, one thinks of the great dog paintings of the French masters Francois Deportes and Jean-Baptiste Oudry,” the latter of whom is renowned for his naturalistic portrayals of greyhounds and dynamic hunting scenes. “In the 19th century, artists on the Continent began to use dogs in genre scenes; often, these show the grittier side of the dog world, and their subjects are rendered in a ‘warts and all’ manner, rather than the idealized portraits found in the paintings across the channel.”
From misty British heaths and icy New England streams to the broad, dry expanse of Sarahan steppes, the landscape of sporting art paintings is just as distinct and significant as the work’s human and nonhuman subjects. Stately dogs in profile or enthusiastic canine packs are rendered against romantic landscapes, billowing clouds, or huge outcroppings of rock, mountains, or forested hills. These compositions tease out the tensions between canine power and strength and the vastness of nature itself, a testament to the glory of the hunt.
Featured Lots:
Lot 94 | John Charles Maggs (British 1819-1895) - Terrier and Greyhounds
Lot 97 | Circle of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French 1656-1755) - White Greyhound in a Landscape
Lot 91 | British School (19th Century)- Greyhound in a Landscape