Art & Literature
The Sporting Art of Juli Kirk
Autumn Avenue by Juli Kirk, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches
Juli Kirk is a classically-trained artist who prefers to work from her imagination. The results to me are both Impressionistic and Expressionistic—the former where the play of changing light on realistic shapes and visible brush strokes stimulate the viewer’s imagination, and the latter where moods and feelings are evoked.
Kirk lives and paints in Easthampton, Massachusetts and Warrenton, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Boston University’s School for the Arts and has also studied art at Queens College (NY), New York Studio School, Cabrillo College (CA), and the University of Santa Cruz (CA).
Juli continued to paint daily while raising three children, riding for a sale barn, running a boarding stable where she gave riding lessons, and training horses on a freelance basis. She was taught to ride by her mother, who was a show rider competing in her youth at the top shows, including Madison Square Garden. Juli got into racing on the fair circuit in western Massachusetts and eventually traveled to Virginia to work with a cousin, Sharon Maloney, who broke racehorses. During that time, a broncy horse at the sale barn bucked her off. The fall resulted in severe back problems.
Night Hunt
His eyes popped open in the dim light cast by the banked fire. For a moment the bed felt strange and then he remembered—Angharad’s house—and there she slept, turned away from him, breathing slowly. He was wide awake and on the alert.
What woke me? The snow was deep on the ground, muffling any outside noises. No cars were here to disturb him, and he was still getting used to the absence of the sounds of human civilization. He cataloged what he could hear—the tick of the embers in the fireplace, the occasional creak of the floorboards as they adjusted to temperature changes, Angharad’s soft breaths.
Then it came again. Muffled barks of excitement. He looked over at his dogs by the fire. Sargent, the yellow feist, was motionless except for his chest rising and falling, but Hugo, the bluetick hound was quivering in his sleep, his paws twitching as he ran. He panted and yipped, his eyes closed. No wonder it woke me, he thought.
George had no trouble interpreting the real sound behind Hugo’s dream, the loud, deep bays as he followed a hot scent. That cry would ring off a hillside, but here it was, indoors, just a remnant to wake him in the night.
The Silver Horn
Colonel John Weatherford, MFH / Illustration by Eleanor Iselin MasonGordon Grand is one of my favorite sporting authors, and his short story, “The Silver Horn,” is one of my favorite foxhunting stories. The reader is transported, in the early part of the twentieth century, to “that venerable hotel on Albemarle Street” in London, which we may readily assume is Brown’s Hotel. Colonel John Weatherford, MFH is relating Florence’s story as she told it to him upon their chance meeting in the hotel dining room after breakfast. I have extracted just the kernel of the story to reproduce here.
Returning from the theater and supper [Florence] had drifted off into a sound sleep, from which she was gently and fancifully awakened without sensing the cause. Her watch showed three o’clock. The roar and rumble of London had faded to its lowest murmur. A midsummer moon filtered through and illuminated the street below. What was it that had so illusively awakened the sleeper? Again she listened. The faint mellow note of a hunting horn drifted up from Piccadilly.
The Hoofs of Horses
The hoofs of horses, Oh! witching and sweet
Is the music earth steals from iron shod feet;
No whisper of lover, no trilling of bird
Can stir me as hoofs of the horses have stirred.
They spurn disappointment and trample despair
And drown with the drumbeats the challenge of care.
With scarlet and silk for their banners above
They are swifter than fortune and sweeter than love.
Fox Hunt by Winslow Homer
Fox Hunt is one of the well-known works of the renowned American artist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910).
In this ominous painting, a fox struggles through the snow in search of a meal. The Atlantic roils below, and the sky above is dark with another approaching storm. The fox has captured the attention of a flock of equally hungry crows that circle above, the nearest threatening to blot out the entire scene in blackness. It was not unusual in the long Maine winters to see a flock of crows attack a weakened fox adrift in deep snow. The red berries peeking through the snow drift provide the only relief to this somber moment.
The Daughter of Bugle Ann: An Excerpt
This foxhound classic by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, reprinted in 2003 by The Derrydale Press, is cloth bound, 153 pages, $18.95, in the Foxhunting Life Shop.Our dogs rustled out a fox, south and east beyond all hearing, running like they were tied to him. It was eleven o’clock at night, middling damp and black-dark, for the young moon had already gone to hide.
We squatted on the west slope of the Divide above Heaven Creek—the usual four of us, armed with boiled eggs and onion sandwiches, and we carried along a water jug, and my father had a half-a-pint of whiskey. Our trucks were under the oaks, just far enough back for firelight to pretend that radiator caps were precious gems. The spooky places among big trees were full of betty-millers and numerous other moths, and beetles were a-buzzing.
But it seemed as if the timberland considered itself incomplete, without voices of hounds splitting themselves upon the shagbarks; and so all life was waiting and summoning—acorn and peeking coon and noxious flytrap weeds beside the creek—urging that the pack return and make dutiful music in the background.
Benjy Davis pulled his thin brown face away from the fire: the blaze was good to watch but hard to sit by. He said to all and sundry, “She’s just about coming in.”
To Carry the Horn: The Hounds of Annwn
To Carry the Horn: The Hounds of Annwyn by Karen Myers, Perkunas Press, Paperback, 404 pp, $17.99It’s too easy to sum up To Carry the Horn: The Hounds of Annwn as “Harry Potter goes foxhunting,” but for adults who grew up on the Harry Potter series—or who used to sneak to read their children’s books—author Karen Myers has created a grown-up fantasy for you.
Myers takes readers on a fascinating ride into a parallel world where she weaves figures from Welsh mythology into a well-written tale that involves stag hunting, a huntsman’s murder, and a large case of greed and envy. Huntsman George Talbot Traherne, a whipper-in with the Rowanton Hunt in Virginia, is catapulted into the Otherworld when he takes a tumble during a foxhunt on a mysterious estate. When he remounts, George finds himself in the midst of a stag hunt where the huntsman, Iolo, has just been murdered.
Hunting with King Louis XV
Rendez-Vous...in the Forest of Compiegne: preliminary painting for the tapestry by Jean-Baptiste Oudry at Fountainebleu
As a John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia, last fall, I did research concerning a series of nine large tapestries woven for Louis XV between 1736 and 1753 at the Gobelin manufacture. Called The Royal Hunts or The History of Louis XV, these tapestries decorated Louis XV’s favorite hunting chateau at Compiègne, just north of Paris. The artist who designed the tapestries, Jean-Baptiste Oudry* (1686-1755), was the official painter of the royal hunts who followed the hunt as part of the king’s entourage. He also painted numerous portraits of the royal hunting dogs.
Louis XV was known for his love of the hunt, and the series was meant to document the ritual of the hunt, the well-managed royal hunting grounds, and, of course, to glorify Louis XV. In the tapestries, as well as in the preliminary paintings for the tapestries now at the chateau of Fontainebleau, there are recognizable portraits of Louis XV, his hunt officers, his favorite horses and dogs, and specific sites in the royal forests of Fontainebleau and Compiègne. I was endeavoring to learn exactly what was transpiring in the images by consulting the eighteenth-century hunt treatises and manuals in the collection of the National Sporting Library.
Readers’ Contest: Most Literate Foxhunter!
George Whyte-Melville (1821 - 1878)I’ve already confessed to you that George Whyte-Melville and William Henry Ogilvie are my favorite sporting poets. In their works are stitched the insistent rhythms of the galloping horse crossing open country. What follows is an ode to Whyte-Melville written by Ogilvie himself.
In this tribute appear numerous lines, phrases and references cleverly taken from many of Whyte-Melville’s poems. Whoever can extract the greatest number of Whyte-Melville lines and phrases in this poem and identify the Whyte-Melville poems from which they are taken will be named Foxhunting Life’s Most Literate Foxhunter of 2012! To submit your entry, click here.
Whyte-Melville by William Henry Ogilvie
With lightest of hands on the bridle, with lightest of hearts in the dance,
To the gods of Adventure and Laughter he quaffed the red wine of Romance,
Then wistfully turning the goblet he spilled the last drops at our feet,
And left us his tales to remember and left us his songs to repeat.
Otho Paget’s Memories of the Shires Re-Published
Melton Mobray Midnight Steeplechase of 1890Captain Otho Paget hunted six days a week with the Quorn, Cottesmore, and Belvoir Foxhounds during some of foxhunting’s golden years—the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. His hunting reports, under the pseudonym Q, were published by The Field, Horse and Hound, and other publications. A collection of the reports was published by Methuen in 1920 in an edition titled Memories of the Shires.
