BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts -- Sporting Life

VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts -- Sporting Life:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VMFASP_110204_017.JPG: Francis Calcraft Turner The Marquis of Waterford and Members of the Tipperary Hunt (The Noble Tips): Tipperary Killing, No Murder, 1842
2. VMFASP_110204_037.JPG: Benjamin Marshall Colonel Henry Campbell Shooting on a Moor, ca. 1806 The Game Act, passed by the English Parliament in 1671, restricted game hunting to only the wealthiest landowners. Such limitations caused a plentiful supply of game; landowners employed gamekeepers to watch over their land and handed out stiff punishments for poaching. Here Marshall depicts landowner Colonel Henry Campbell shooting on a northern moor. The Campbell family was known for their well-known "Kingston" breed of pointers, as evidenced by the dog in the left foreground that is correctly "backing off" the quarry so as not to get too far ahead of the rest of the party.
3. VMFASP_110204_111.JPG: John Collett The Joys of the Chase, or the Rising Woman and the Falling Man, 1780 The artist here satirizes two comic types; the clumsy country parson allegedly idling his time away in the country and the lively "New Woman" enjoying her newfound freedom to participate in hunts. This painting reached mass audiences through circulation by engravings in mezzotint.
4. VMFASP_110204_134.JPG: John E. Ferneley Count Sandor's Hunting Exploits in Leicestershire, 1829 (A set of ten sketches) The ten "sketches" record the amusing misadventures of Moritz, Count Sandor, a Hungarian visitor on the hunting field at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, during the season of 1828-29. He himself commissioned this set of small comic paintings from the artist (to whom he paid 30 guineas for the set, whereas he paid Tilbury, the famous horse dealer and carriage designer, 1,000 pounds for the hire of eight horses for the season). The count was described by his daughter, Princess Metternich, as "daring to the point of recklessness," for which he was much admired in Leicestershire. Unfortunately, repeated falls throughout his life led eventually to brain damage and fits on insanity until his death in 1878.
5. VMFASP_110204_295.JPG: Charles Cooper Henderson Mail Coach Incidents: The Birmingham-London Royal Mail, ca 1820-30 In these four scenes, Henderson chronicles the trials and challenges faced by the Royal Mail Coach as it traveled throughout England. Identified by its distinctive red wheels, the royal coat of arms emblazoned o its side, and the guard dressed in royal livery at the rear, the Mail Coach connected distinct parts of the country to London from 17984 until the middle of the 19th century. The journey was arduous as coaches frequently ran at night over rough roads, and they rarely stopped except to change horses every seven to ten miles. Henderson's lively and detailed style is ideally suited to describing different times of day and locales, as well as incidents such as the fall of a horse.
6. VMFASP_110204_341.JPG: Winslow Homer Coursing the Hare, ca 1882-83 Already a well-established artist in the United States, Homer traveled to England in 1881. He settled in the northern fishing village of Cullercoats, near the mouth of the Tyne River, where he remained for a year and a half. The journey was a turning point in the artist's career, a fact not lost on contemporary critics who noted the dark mood, fluent brushstrokes, the heightened action of his English output. These qualities are evident in this scene of coursing, the sport of hunting hares and other field animals with greyhounds. Homer has exaggerated the scale relationships between the women spectators waving on the hare, the sportsman in full chase, and the hare running for its life, so that they appear as archetypes of pursuer and pursued rather than participants in an exactly rendered hunt. The resulting strangeness of this painting shows Homer's affinity with Symbolist artists for whom unconscious feelings were more important to the artist than the exact representation of nature.
7. VMFASP_110204_350.JPG: Winslow Homer Saddle Horse, ca 1869
8. VMFASP_110204_357.JPG: Thomas Eakins Studies of Game Birds, Probably Rails, ca 1874
9. VMFASP_110204_362.JPG: Thomas Eakins The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds on the Cohansey Marshes, ca. 1874 Sport was an important subject and lifelong pursuit for Thomas Eakins. The artist and his family frequented a hunting cottage outside Philadelphia near the confluence of the Cohansey and Delaware rivers in southwestern New Jersey. The marshy area provided an ideal habitat for reed birds such as the sora rail, which is probably the game bird depicted in the Eakins sketch also on view in this gallery. Hunting in marshes requires intense cooperation between the pusher who guides the boat and spots the quarry, and the hunter who shoots for the game; in this case the artist is shown expertly balancing the boat so that his father may shoot. This painting, inscribed "BENJAMIN EAKINS FILIUS PINXIT" (painted by the son of Benjamin Eakins), offers a clear expression of Eakins's deep respect for his father, who shared his son's love of sport and supported him during his early career. Father and son remained extremely close until the elder Eakins died in 1899.
10. VMFASP_110204_374.JPG: Albert Bierstadt Coastal Harvesters, 1863 or later
11. VMFASP_110204_400.JPG: Pierre Bonnard Under Starter's Orders (At the Races), ca 1911 The subject of horse racing has a long tradition in French art beginning in the 19th century with Theodore Gericault, one of whose masterworks in this genre, Mounted Jockey, is also in the Mellon Collection. The other French artist most connected with racing and horses is Edgar Degas, also represented by important works in the Mellon Collection. Unlike these two artists, Bonnard did not see the races in terms of the private relationship of horse and rider but as a gaudy public event. He tellingly placed as much emphasis on the fashionable spectators in the foreground as on the start of the race itself.
12. VMFASP_110204_412.JPG: Edgar Degas At the Races: Before the Start, ca 1880 A group of elegant and nervous Thoroughbreds gather before the start of a race. Degas possibly used sketches -- made on site at such events -- as the basis for larger paintings. This piece also suggests the influence of Eadweard Muybridge's recently published sequential photographs of horses and riders in motion. Nonetheless, Degas here seems less interested in reproducing nature than in exploring nuances of color and space.
13. VMFASP_110204_416.JPG: Edgar Degas Jockey in Blue on a Chestnut Horse, ca 1889 In his later equestrian paintings, Degas moved away from Impressionism toward Symbolism. The Impressionist focus on observed nature is gone and in its place one senses the personal, subjective vision of the artist. Here, the horse and jockey turn their backs to us as they ride along in a barren landscape under an empty sky. Ultimately, Degas evokes a poignant mood but leaves us with no key to the mystery of the subject matter.
14. VMFASP_110204_423.JPG: Acquisition in Honor of VMFA's 75th Anniversary Antoine-Louis Barye Turkish Horse, ca 1857
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Description of Subject Matter: The Paul Mellon Collection of British Sporting Art:
During his lifetime, Paul Mellon (1907-1999) amassed the most important collection of British art outside of England. In 1985 he gave a significant part of his British sporting art collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and supervised the original installation to reflect his aesthetic ideals. In British art in general and also in sporting art, Mr. Mellon perceived an honesty and directness that were congenial to his taste and way of life.
The first British work Paul Mellon bought, in 1936, was Pumpkin with Stable Lad painted by 18th-century artist George Stubbs and now at the Yale center for British Art. However, he did not begin to collect British art seriously until 1959 when then VMFA director Leslie Cheek persuaded him to chair the organizing committee for the exhibition Sport and the Horse, which opened at this museum the following year. Almost as soon as he began collecting, Mr. Mellon decided that his collection would enter the public domain. He chose the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Yale Center for British Art as the primary destinations for his unrivaled collection of British art.
Mr. Mellon also became a great horseman himself (he called horses his "one great recreation in life"). As an owner he had spectacular successes not only in U.S. races, including those of the Triple Crown, but also in the English Derby and the French Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Additionally, he hunted extensively with horses, and this activity represented his nostalgic belief in the natural world as a source of value and sustenance.
"Hunting is another example of the reaction which has set up inside me against business, the city, modern industrial drabness, the suppression of the natural emotions and feelings... It involves the use of the horse, that instinctive animal, and man's mastery of the horse."
-- Paul Mellon, 1992
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