Thomas Blinks. Note 18.

In Note 13 I mentioned a pair of paintings of Shooting Dogs by Blinks at Richard Green's last exhibition of Sporting and British Paintings. Here, I am writing a little more about Thomas Blinks (1853-1910), or Tom or Tommy Blinks as he was known to his friends. He painted hounds, hunting and steeplechasing scenes, dogs and shooting subjects - all with rather more vitality than similar pictures by his senior but near contemporary, John Emms (1841-1912). Although Blinks's paintings of shooting dogs at work now command high prices, he is not that well known despite the advantage of having many engravings published after his work, which Emms did not.

Both artists practised during an otherwise fairly bleak period of British sporting art. By bleak, I mean dull! There were few painters who satisfactorily bridged the gap between the humour and draughtsmanship of the Alkens (Henry Alken Snr. died in 1851) and a revival in this genre led by G.D. Armour (1864-1949) and Cecil Aldin (1870-1935).

Much of what we know about artist is derived from a magazine article about Blinks while he was still alive. A Master of British Sports, Mr Thomas Blinks and his Pictures, by the prolific author S.L. Bensusan, was published in The Windsor Magazine for 1908-09. Then in 1968, F. Gordon Roe wrote about Tommy Blinks in the long defunct British Racehorse. (This racing periodical contained numerous pieces on British and foreign sporting art and artists that have proved invaluable to me in writing on this theme.). Gordon Roe includes a pencil sketch of Blinks drawn by his father, Fred Roe, who was a friend of the artist. We see a slightly rotund, walrous-moustached Blinks, with short pointed beard, and quizzical eyebrows beneath a jauntily askew straw boater. He is in shirtsleeves, waistcoat, breeches and leather leggings, looking a very jolly fellow. A later more somber oil, also by Fred Roe, is illustrated in Bensusan's earlier piece. I am indebted to Messrs. Bensusan and Roe for much of the material, but not all, that I have used in this Note.

Blinks was born at Maidstone, Kent in 1853, the son of a butcher. It appears that the family then moved to Ticehurst in Sussex where young Tommy showd an aptitude for drawing at school, as well as for whipping-in for a farmer's trencher-fed pack of hounds. His father was determined to apprentice his son to a local tailor. This drove young Blinks to run away to an uncle and aunt. Swiftly returned home, Blinks senior relented.

The youthful Tommy's art education seems to have been scanty. When asked in later life how he acquired an ability to paint horses, his pithy response was simply: "Tattersalls". He was referring to the horse sales that were conducted weekly and sometimes more frequently by the firm of Tattersalls, London at what is now known as Knightsbridge Green. Newly built in 1865, the premises remained in use until 1939 when the operation was concentrated at Newmarket. Thomas's father, Richard Blinks, is described by Bensusan as a yeoman farmer, which probably meant the he butchered his own stock, and sometimes for others, as was the practice at the time. This being so, Tommy would have had the opportunity to study all types of animals from his earliest days.

By 1881, Tommy was exhibiting at the Dudley Gallery in London. In 1882, he showed A Slashing Finish (probably steeplechasing) for sale at £78. 10s. It was as a result of one of his early exhibits at the Dudley Gallery that Blinks was taken up by the print publishers Arthur Tooth & Sons. An examination of The Year's Art between October 1882 and November 1902 shows that more than forty of his paintings were published as etchings or mezzotints (and later photo engravings), most by Tooth & Sons. Their prices varied, but typically an Artist's Proof cost 5 Gns., of which 200 were printed, ensuring the artist a regular if modest annual income. From 1883 until 1904, twenty-four of his paintings were shown at the Royal Acadmey - the early pictures were sent in from Kentish Town and, when he became well established after 1886, Blinks sent them in from St John's Wood.

Among Blinks's hunting paintings is one titled The Ferry, exhibited at the RA in 1898. This memorable if slightly absurd image is of five statuesque, mounted riders surrounded by other hunt staff and hounds on a flat-bottomed craft in the middle of a fortunately slow moving and smooth river. Today, 'Health and Safety' would have a fit, and rightly so. Twenty years previously a tragedy had overtaken the York and Ainsty Hunt when a similar ferry bearing thirteen men and eleven horses capsized while crossing the River Ure at Newby. The Master, Sir Charles Slingsby, kennel huntsman Charles Orvis, and two followers were drowned. A Thomas Slingsby painted a record of this disaster. For some time Blinks's picture has been thought to be of the York and Ainsty. However, the hunt uniform is wrong, and more recent claimants have included the South Notts Hunt on the Trent and the Wheatland crossing the River Severn. The painting was engraved as part of a set of four so that, despite the very distinct portraiture of the occupants being carried, The Ferry may have been an imaginary scene. It would be a pity if Blinks was only remembered for this extraordinary painting, but once seen., it is hard to forget! In his usually more active hunting pictures, Tommy Blinks demonstrates that he can paint hunting and hounds with enormous veracity and vigour. This is partly due to his being fond of hunting himself, as he was of shooting, another sport that he painted extremely well.

As well as having a house at St John's Wood (where he died from Bright's Disease on 29 December 1910), Blinks had a farmhouse in Hertfordshire. His sporting scenes are, for the most part, set in unexciting, flat country. There is nothing much in the way of the atmosphere found in Ferneley's Leicestershire or a snowbound landscape by Alken or James Pollard, just a rather staid Home Counties flavour. This is not to denigrate his ability, but illustrates the trough into which much of British sporting art had fallen at the time. But then again, comparing the energy of much of his painting with the rather stolid ordinariness of that of Emms (who died two years after him in a whisky-induced haze), Blinks is a leader in the bleak period already explained.