Sportsmen in a Landscape [antikvár]

Salute to the English Sporting Artists WHEN Ben Marshall told a friend he was giving up portrait painting in London and intended to settle at Newmarket his friend exclaimed in surprise: 'Surely that is a barren spot for the fine árts?' Marshall smiled. 6The second animal in creation is a fine horse', he replied; 'and at Newmarket I can study him in the greatest grandeur, beauty and variety.' For good measure he added his oft-repeated quip that a man would more willingly give him fifty guineas for a portrait of his favourite horse than he would part with ten for a likeness of his wife. I am sure our forebears were not lacking in gallantry or interest in their wives-for what otherwise would we all be doing here?-but it is no less clear they were devoted to sport. The English aristocracy and landed gentry from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century enjoyed great privileges and wealth, yet most of them preferred country life and sport to a town existence. This preference is reflected in the pictures they commissioned. So great was the demand for hunting scenes, portraits of racehorses, and pictures of angiing, beagling, coursing and the rest, that many artists were able to devote their whole time to meeting it. Thus English sporting pictures are not only to be cherished as memorials of old sporting occasions, but should be regarded as useful guides to an understanding of our social past. It is significant that as the Industrial Revolution triumphed and 4the field of coal beat the field of barley'; and as the horse lost his immemorial status as mankind's King of Servants with the advent of the railways, there came alsó a decline in sporting art. Somé blame the camera for this, of course, and stress that there was a decline generally in English painting in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It seems to me that certain art forms must die, or at least decline ii