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
Unsurpringly, however, the main buyers of sporting art tend to be from places where there is a tradition of field sports or racing together with institutions with a commitment to the genre. The British Sporting Art Trust, for instance, is based in Newmarket. In 2006 the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, acquired J.F. Herring Jr’s Cotherstone (1844), a painting of the prize-winning racehorse bred by the museum’s founder, John Bowes, at Christie’s, New York, and followed this with the purchase of a miniature of Cotherstone’s trainer, John Scott, last year.
It is, however, the combination of North America’s wealth, interest in genealogy – particularly English, Irish and Scottish roots – and the popularity of breeding and showing pedigree dogs that makes it a major market for sporting art. The Red Prince Mare, for instance, came from the collection of John Hay Whitney, whose family is famous for owning racehorses and playing polo.
America’s best-known collection of sporting art is that assembled by Paul Mellon, which now forms part of the Yale Center for British Art. However, the country’s ‘Horse and Hunt Capital’ is Middleburg, Virginia, home of the National Sporting Library. The surrounding area, according to Turner Reuter Jr., its Curator of Fine Arts, is ‘the Leicestershire of America, the village of Middleburg likened to Melton Mowbray of old’. The library, which owns a collection of sporting art built from generous bequests of works by Munnings, John Emms, George Wright, J. F. Herring Jr, Ben Marshall and others, has recently received planning approval to establish the Museum of Sporting Art at Vine Hill to house it. Given its roll-call of generous donors – who include Paul Mellon – and its ambitions to expand, the library will doubtless wish to acquire additional important examples of this genre, and will be prepared to pay for the best, which could make the future of this market very interesting.
1 The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), 1867. Watercolour on paper, 62.9 x 127.3 cm. Sotheby’s, New York, 19th-century European Art (18 April 2007). $480,000
3 Lord Rockingham’s Bay Malton with John Singleton up by George Stubbs (1724-1806), c. 1766. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 127 cm. Sold by Richard Green Gallery, London, 1998
4 The Red Prince Mare by A.J. Munnings (1878-1959) 1921. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Sotheby’s, New York, The Collection of Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney (5 May 2004). $7.8m
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