Collectors' Focus
Traditionally found hanging in English country houses, sporting art and wildlife scenes are highly valued and sought after in the United States – and increasingly further afield, writes Annie Blinkhorn.
Annie Blinkhorn, Sunday, 29th June 2008
Currently on loan to York Art Gallery for a touring exhibition, Whistlejacket (c. 1762) by George Stubbs (1724-1806) is the top-selling postcard at the gift shop of its usual home, the National Gallery, London. This is no mean feat considering the other well-known, popular images that the National has in its collection. It is almost certainly the country’s best-known piece of sporting art and Stubbs is the leading name associated with the genre. Sporting art is most closely associated with the depiction of hunting scenes, originally created for wealthy families on whose land field sports were pursued. But although the nature of the subject matter may be thought by some to tell against it – legislation against hunting with dogs was passed in the UK four years ago – sporting art remains a buoyant market.
Works by Stubbs himself, widely agreed to be the finest horse painter England has produced, and by his follower Ben Marshall, are highly sought after, but their works appear at auction infrequently. The Richard Green Gallery has sold paintings by both artists in the past five to 10 years, including Stubbs’s Bay Malton with John Singleton Up (c. 1766; Fig. 3) and Portrait of a Newfoundland Dog (1803) and Marshall’s Lord Jersey’s Bay Colt Mameluke with his Trainer and Groom on Epsom Downs (1827).
The names that more often find their way onto the market are John Wootton (1682-1764), James Seymour (c. 1702-1752), John Ferneley Sr (1782-1860) and John Frederick Herring Sr (1795-1865). According to Brandon Lindberg, Associate Director and Head of Sporting Art Sales at Christie’s, London, it is the ‘finest examples, and in the best condition, of these artists’ work that command the highest prices at auction’. Notable lots of recent years have been John Frederick Herring Sr’s Feeding the Horse (1828), sold for £636,000, and Ferneley’s Portrait of Captain James Ogilvy Fairlie of Coodham, Full-length, in Hunting Dress (1839), sold for £204,500, both at Christie’s, London, in May this year. From the same sale, two oil paintings, Thomas Roberts’s Mares and a Foal in a Wooded Landscape and James Walsham Baldock’s A Gentleman Standing Beside his Hunter, in a Wooded Landscape (c. 1867-87) more than doubled the high end of their £30,000-£50,000 estimates, each making £114,000.
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