Art & Literature
The Old Customer
At Fedamore in Co Limerick where Dorothea Conyers lived circa 1885, an extraordinary fox dwelt in the extensive gorse covert there. Mr. Nugent Humble, Master of the Co Limerick foxhounds, called it The Old Customer.
He was a very long, dark fox, and I really believe he liked being hunted. Day after day, he took hounds on the same lines―he had two―and seemed to beat them when he liked.
The First Flight
An ode to the “gallant First Flight,” this is one Ogilvie poem that your editor has too often overlooked. No longer!
By John F. Herring
While there’s one on his feet with a tale to repeat
And another is sampling a drink,
The eager First Flight have a girth to pull tight
Or a chain to let out by a link;
While the boisterous laugh in that circle of chaff
The opening music has drowned,
You will hear the First Flight as they whisper “That’s right!’
To the note of a favorite hound.
AAEA Returns Home for 40-year Retrospective
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.
A Sportsman’s Artist: Franklin Brooke Voss
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.
Toulouse-Lautrec: Horses, Hounds, and the Hunt
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.
Alfred Wheeler’s Duster
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.
True to the Line, A Hunting Life
Book Review by Dulany Noble
True to the Line, A Hunting Life, Adrian Dangar, Quiller, UK, 2017, Hardbound, $31.50, available at Horse Country Saddlery
I looked forward to reading this book by Adrian Dangar because I love stories about foxhunting, and, to be clear, this book is about foxhunting and about hunting all sorts of quarries, not just foxes. It is not about fox chasing. If you are reading this, I am sure you know that foxhunting in England was not strictly for the sport. It was to kill foxes that harm the livestock of the landowners and farmers in the country and to control the prolific fox population.
Still Horse Crazy After All These Years
Book Review by Caroline Treviranus Leake
Still Horse Crazy After All These Years, James Wofford, Trafalgar Square Books, North Pomfret, Vermont, 2021, $27.95
James Wofford was born in 1944 in Kansas. His father was stationed at Fort Riley, longtime home to the U.S. Cavalry. Early on, at the age of three, Jim received ‘riding lessons’ from his older sister and brothers, including jumping little fences on his 12-hand Shetland pony, Merrylegs. He would grab the horn of his Western saddle and ‘hang on.’ His siblings led the pony over the fences after which they allowed Jim to jump on his own.
As a result of that early and sophisticated training regimen (or despite it), during Jim’s competitive career, he earned team silver medals in two Olympic Games, an individual and a team bronze at two World Championships, and team gold at the Pan American Games. He also won five US National Championships (each on a different horse) and two Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Events on two different horses.
Lost Hound
Illustration by Jane Gaston from "Lost Hound," Robert Ashcom, The Derrydale Press and Millwood House, 1999, 161 pages
If you’ve ever walked the interstate
You know the dream of summer thunder with
No rain and heat in solemn surge like fate
Gone out of sync―where eighteen-wheelers brew
Their shouted, tire-born songs with diesel breath;
And fast food wrappers feed the session’s mood.
Advice to a Young Huntsman
Learning to Handle Hounds in the Field
Frank Freeman: 21 years as huntsman to the Pytchley / Painting by George Wright (British)
What follows is an excerpt from The History of Foxhunting by Patrick Chalmers. Therein, the following text is quoted from Lord Chaplin’s introduction to Lord Henry Bentinck’s Foxhounds and Their Handling in the Field.
I was rather late one morning in arriving at a gorse covert in the Belvoir Country...into which the hounds had just been put to draw. I...saw at once it wasn’t the huntsman who was in the covert with the hounds, and I was told it was the first whip, Freeman, who had never hunted them before, the huntsman being disabled by a fall the previous day. So I went into the covert to see if I could help him.
