Hunting - Big game, deer, fox etc

Hunting has been the most consistently depicted of all field sports, and the antique prints it generated form one of the richest and most varied collecting areas in all sporting art. From the elaborate fox hunting scenes of Henry Alken to the big game trophies of Victorian Africa and India, from the Scottish deer forest to the fox coverts of the Midland shires, hunting imagery spans an enormous range of subjects, techniques and social worlds, united by the fundamental drama of pursuit and the particular visual appeal of animals in motion across open landscape.

Fox hunting dominated British sporting art through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the prints associated with it are among the most celebrated and widely collected in the entire sporting tradition. Henry Alken, whose illustrated hunting publications of the 1820s and 1830s defined the visual language of the sport, produced images of exceptional liveliness and accuracy that were engraved and distributed in editions sufficient to make them familiar objects in the drawing rooms of the sporting gentry across Britain. The humour, the energy and the precise observation of horse and hound that characterise the best Alken prints have given them a lasting appeal that goes well beyond the hunting community.

Deer stalking on the Scottish Highland estates — the great sporting tradition that developed in the early nineteenth century as the clearances transformed the human geography of the Highlands — generated its own distinctive illustrative tradition. The lonely landscapes of the Highland deer forest, the physical demands of stalking across rough terrain and the specific skills required to bring a stag within rifle range all provided subjects for artists who found in Highland sport a combination of natural drama and romantic landscape that appealed to a wide audience. Edwin Landseer’s paintings of Highland sporting subjects, widely engraved and distributed, were among the most popular British prints of the Victorian period.

Big game hunting in Africa and India — the sporting tradition that accompanied British imperial expansion — produced illustrated accounts of a quite different character. The hunting narratives of Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, William Cornwallis Harris and their successors combined detailed description of African wildlife with dramatic illustration of encounters with lion, elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo that were as much natural history documents as sporting records. These images are of particular interest to collectors of African history and natural history illustration as well as to those focused on the sporting tradition.

The social world of hunting — the meet, the hunt ball, the hunting field seen as a social occasion as much as a sporting one — attracted illustrators who recognised that the significance of fox hunting lay as much in its role as a social institution as in the activity itself. John Leech’s hunting illustrations for Punch and similar publications capture the comedy and the social pretension of the hunting field with a wit that reads freshly today.

For collectors, antique hunting prints offer material of exceptional variety and consistent visual appeal. Whether the interest is in the sporting tradition itself, in the social history of the landed gentry, in the natural history of the animals pursued, or simply in the quality of sporting art at its finest, hunting prints remain among the most actively collected and consistently appealing areas of antique sporting illustration.