Art

The Eleventh annual Sporting Art Auction at the Keeneland Sales Pavilion in Lexington, Kentucky, was held last fall. The event was a cooperative venture between the world’s largest Thoroughbred auction house and its Lexington, Kentucky neighbor, Cross Gate Gallery, a leading dealer in the world’s finest sporting art.

"Well Done, Chaps!" by Cathy Antkes Choyce.

Cathy Antkes Choyce drew this wonderful scene, showing those “invisible tethers” that tie a hound to the huntsman.

Larry Wheeler, Meet at Sunrise, Oil, 16 x 20 inches, Collection of the Artist

The National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, Virginia, will present an exhibition of artwork by members of the American Academy of Equine Art―both living and deceased. The NSL&M is a fitting venue for this exhibit, titled 2020 Hindsight: 40 Years of the American Academy of Equine Art. The AAEA shares with the NSL&M a founder and several of the earliest supports of both institutions.

The Museum exhibition will be open to visitors from November 12, 2021, through March 20, 2022. Claudia Pfeiffer, George L. Ohrstom, Jr, Curator of the Museum, curated the exhibit. Though AAEA artists and this exhibit embrace numerous equestrian disciplines―racing, showing, steeplechasing, polo, breeding, stable, and pasture scenes―the images in this article are limited to foxhunting-related subjects.

Franklin Brooke Voss (American, 1880–1953), Tom Allison, Huntsman of Meadow Brook Hounds, 1934, 12 x 16 1/8 inches, National Sporting Library & Museum, Gift of Katrina Hickox Becker, 2020

Franklin Brooke Voss counted among his patrons a Who’s Who of some of the most successful and affluent people in the United States in the early-to-mid-20th century, including the likes of John Hay Whitney, J. Watson Webb, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Alfred Vanderbilt, Walter Jeffords, F. Ambrose Clark, and Emily T. DuPont. These patrons, however, had something other than wealth in common. They were all equestrians in a golden age of turf and field sports, and just as importantly, they were supporters of the arts.

This astonishing photograph, sent by Debra Pring, shows Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec standing by horse and hound and holding a French stag hunting horn.

And here we thought that the Master Post-Impressionist spent all his spare time at the Moulin Rouge with wine, dancers, prostitutes, and his fellow artist friends. Not so! Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was well familiar with horses, hounds, and stag hunting.

Duster by Alfred Wheeler, 1910, oil on board, 8 x 9-1/2 inches, framed 11-1/2 x 13 inches, $4,500.

Here’s a small, nicely-framed painting of a foxhound by a respected English artist born in the mid-nineteenth century. It is priced at $4,500 by an equally respected art gallery in New York. If I were starting my own collection of sporting art and still had wall space in my home (and my other bills were paid), I would buy it.

The painting is a head-and-neck portrait of an Old (traditionally-bred) English foxhound, clearly from the days when English hunt staff cropped the ears―happily no longer practiced. It’s not terribly creative. Rather formulaic when compared to another painting by the same artist―this other hound being one in a set of five small paintings of four hounds and a pair of hunters from the Duke of Beaufort’s establishment. The two are similar in anatomy, view, and shading technique but different in the ear and eye details.

“The Country Life of an Artist: How Christmas Cards Tell My Story,” Anita Baarns, Dog Branch Publishing LLC, 2020, 205 pages, 281 works of art, spot gloss varnished, hardcover in Full Sierra cloth, 11-1/4 x 8-3/4, $67.80 (tax included).

Christmas cards help tell the story of an artist’s life.
Review by Norman Fine

Talented animal artist Anita Baarns has produced an intriguing and intimate book about her art and how art relates to her very self. Richly made and oversized in a landscape format to better display the artwork, her book is filled with examples rendered in pencil, charcoal, ink, pastel, watercolor, oil, and...yes...even crayon. In it she shows and tells a story of discovering, appreciating, experimenting, and continually developing her own talents and techniques as an artist.

Book Review by Norman Fine

Bound to the Country: 30 Years of Photographing Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds, photographs and text by Jim Graham, Brilliant Graphics, 2020, hardbound, 10-1/4 x 12-1/2, color, casebound, cloth, 100lb matte fine art paper, 196 pages with a gatefold, duotone and four-color with 400 line hybrid screening, $75.00 Click here for a video preview; click here to purchase.

This long-awaited, lushly-produced, oversized book of photographic art, Bound to the Country: 30 Years of Photographing Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds by Jim Graham, is available for purchase.

This is not just a book about the Cheshire, and it is not just a book about Chester County’s pretty landscape. It is a magnificent work of the photographer’s art. It is a book inspired by a unique sporting community precariously situated between the suburbs of Wilmington and Philadelphia. For more than a hundred years this community has been zealously preserved by people of character who desired to live out their own vision of family life, a vision not left to the local Board of Commerce. You must see Jim Graham’s portraiture of these individuals. The images stun me. Character and soul are not easily captured in photographs.

Lot 9, Joseph Maiden (British, 1813 - 1843), WARE HORSE, Oil on board, 10-1/2" x 12", Signed, Inscribed en verso, $4,000 - 6,000

Sunday, November 22, 2020 will mark the eighth annual Sporting Art Auction at the Keeneland Sales Pavilion—a cooperative venture between the world’s largest Thoroughbred auction house and its Lexington, Kentucky neighbor, Cross Gate Gallery, a leading source of the world’s finest sporting art.

Bids may be made online or by phone for works by highly regarded artists at estimated prices as low as $1,000—a charcoal sketch by Munnings, for example. The hammer will fall on many lovely hunting paintings in the $3,000 to $10,000 range. At the more rarified altitudes, an Andrew Wyeth painting might bring six figures, and several of LeRoy Neiman's works are offered, one of which will surely fetch six figures. Be sure to see them when the online catalog becomes available.

“Elegance.” Maureen Conroy Britell out with the Piedmont Fox Hounds (VA). Acrylic paint on textured acrylic paper.

Irish artist Liam Clancy made a fast tour of the Virginia and Maryland hunting countries during the first week of March 2020—just before the world stopped in its tracks as the result of COVID. He got in some hunting, both mounted and on foot, and he gathered material for his work—painting commissions.

Liam works mostly in acrylic paint, which he likes for its versatility. “I can dash off something that looks like a watercolor, or build up a painting in layers as you would with oils,” he explains.