Sporting Paintings at Richard Green. Note 13.

Sadly the years seem to have passed when, each autumn, Richard Green was able to fill his Gallery at 147 New Bond Street, W1S with fine sporting paintings. Long, long ago, Ackermann, held the same type of annual exhibition, before the bankers pulled the rug from under their feet the night before their show opened! In Richard Green's exhibition of Sporting and British Paintings opening on 12 November there are fourteen sporting pictures, a number of sea- and landscapes, as well as four brilliant portraits. Few as the sporting pictures are, what is on show is of the highest quality, (bar two!). It may be that the demand for quality is the limiting factor in terms of number. However, there have been some interesting paintings for sale during the past six months, not least those that came originally from the Pitt Rivers family recently sold by Bonhams: a Wootton, a Spencer and a pair by Francis Sartoriuses (1734-1804).

In Bond Street, James Seymour's 1750 oil of the Duke of Kingston's racehorse Jolly Roger led by a mounted groom in a wooded landscape has a marvellous tranquillity about it, unlike the lives of the horse's owner, or for that matter the artist. The 'un-showiness' harks back to some of Seymour's early drawings, and perhaps to those pencilled by a Bernard Lens (there were four of them) whose authorship remains confusing. The bony bodies and angular heads for which Seymour is well known came later. This picture was part of the recent dispersal by Christie's of the late Simon Sainsbury's wide-ranging collections.

John Nost Sartorius (Note 10) is represented by a delightfulHunt in Full Cry (1812), and a pair of slightly larger (28 x 36 inches) paintings: A Hunt Breaking Cover and another Hunt in Full Cry (each 1813). The first (25 x 30 inches) reminds one of the much earlier (1781) Full Cry by the same artist and with a very similar composition, in the James Harvey British Art Sporting Exhibition in Langton Street, SW10. At various distances, the riders emerge from a lightly wooded hillside following their well-matched pack of hounds, right to left. In the distance, the wily Charlie doubles back left to right. This pleasing compositional formula allows an appreciation of distance that is often lacking in Ferneley's long friezes of hunt scurries that I feel are rather overrated. However, there is nothing overrated in the two paintings by John Ferneley in the Richard Green exhibition. They are extremely fine equestrian portraits. One is of a quiet, almost intimate, scene of the mounted Master John Marriot taking leave of his young sister outside a rose-bowered door, painted in 1832. The other is a much grander affair of Captain James Ogilvie Fairlea with his grooms and hunters - or should it be hunters and grooms? Captain Fairlea of Williamfield House, Coodham, Ayrshire was plainly a 'good egg'. Among his many attributes, he assisted the Earl of Eglinton in mounting the great, rain-soaked, Tournament in honour of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1839. But he does look a little bit pleased with himself!

Continuing in chronological order of the artists' lives, there is an unnamed Master of the Royal Buckhounds flying over rails on his grey hunter by G.H. Laporte, c.1835-40; and a pretty, yet determined-looking, Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower (aged nine) on her galloping pony, by Sir Francis Grant PRA. In Note 4 I wrote of my interest in the bravura painting of A Gentleman with his Groom driving a Tandem on the Road to London, 1828, by Benjamin Herring Snr. (1806-1830). This painting was sold at Christie's in London on 23 May this year, and can now be seen again at Richard Green - no doubt with an added premium! I am no closer to discovering whether the smart young 'whip' is a member of a Somerset county Bridges family or not but, whoever he is, he definitely deserves a name to complete the story of this fine painting by the short-lived Ben Herring. This is followed by two sedate hunters by the Home Counties favourite, William Barraud, and a typical group of vignettes in one frame by W.J. Shayer. There are also two farmyard scenes by Ben Herring's nephew, J.F. Herring Jnr. that have the familiarity of the tops of biscuit tins. Are they sporting paintings?

The pair of paintings of English Pointers and English Setters by Thomas Blinks (1853-1910) tell us what a good artist he could be. In 1908, S.L. Bensusan wrote about Tommy Blinks in the obscure Windsor Magazine. The title of his article was: A Master of British Sports, and so he was during this otherwise dull period of English sporting painting. In 1968, F. Gordon Roe wrote: "thickset, rubicund, trimly bearded, Blinks brought to his marked ability as a painter a practical experience of horse-flesh and sporting life". And, back to the Windsor Magazine: "at the age of nine or ten" he "was whipper-in for a neighbouring farmer's trencher-fed pack" in Kent. Blinks painted many hunting and steeplechasing pictures but today it is his portraits of hounds and dogs that are most highly sought after, vying with those by his contemporary, John Emms. I must write about Blinks one day.

Last among the sporting pictures is Munnings's Winter Sunshine: Huntsman by a Covert. It was apparently painted in about 1913. While prolific all his life, Munnings was in top gear at this date, and it shows in this impressionist picture, in his favourite canvas size: 20 x 24 inches. Brilliantly 'lit', the wood in the background is sketched with rapid brush strokes; the horse and scarlet-coated huntsman are alert to their tasks. Munnings pulled out this wonderful small study from his studio to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1956, three years before he died.

I mentioned four portraits at the beginning of this piece. They are by Allan Ramsay, George Romney, Angelica Kauffman RA, and Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA. The Kauffman is a small oval canvas of Theresa Parker, aged about three years. It is a little insipid, but the child's face is beautifully portrayed. The other paintings are of proud men and, by Lawrence, of a golden youth. This last, a half-length, is of the Hon. Frederick William Stewart, later 4th Marquess of Londonderry (1805-1872). Well known from both exhibitions and literature, this painting is cause enough alone to visit the exhibition.