Does art give a true picture?

Raymond Carr

SPORTING ART IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND by Stephen Deuchar

Yale, £24.95, pp.195

It is odd to be reminded that The Spectator was once a journal that made uncomfortable reading for foxhunters. The Whig intellectuals of the 18th century, like their descendants today, saw foxhunting as the preferred occupation of Tory back- woodsmen, of rustic reactionaries outside the pale of civilised society. In the pages of The Spectator, Addison presents Sir Roger de Coverley as a lovable figure from a past scorned by the efficient anti-Tory present. De Coverley's passion for hunting, 'his remarkable enmity towards foxes', Stephen Deuchar writes, 'was one aspect of his character which The Spectator never tired of lampooning'. It was the badge of his 'rusticity'.

This is but one example of the author's extensive use of literary sources to illus- trate his themes. How does sporting art reflect and react to the controversies that have always surrounded rural sports? How do the images it presents mirror the perceptions and prejudices in particular about racing and hunting of both 'insiders' — the sportsmen themselves — and 'out- siders' — the public at large? (Fishing was early canonised by Isaac Walton as a sport befitting the contemplative intellectual).

• How does the image presented in art correspond to or contradict the reality and fit within the political and social milieu of 18th-century England? This book is a splendid piece of scholarship, superbly illustrated. It must rank with Professor Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World as a milestone in the study of our reaction to nature and, in this case, to the pursuits that 'nature' affords.

The image of rural sport in the early years of the 18th century still reflected its royal origins and its connections with the great landed families. 'It is not fitting', King James observed, 'that clowns should have these sports.' Hunting was loaded with moral values. It was a healthy anti- dote to the luxury and vices of `smoaky towns'. It was a training for the arts of statesmanship and war — 200 years later the historian of the Beauvoir and Badmin- ton hunts could maintain that the hunting field was the proper breeding ground of a race fit to rule the gmpire.

The grand vision of hunting as an ennobl- ing sport practised exclusively by the nobil- ity fills the canvasses of John Wootton (1683-1764). Its exclusiveness stands re- vealed when servants are put in their proper place, physically distanced from their masters. As a reader of the Sports- man's Magazine put it in 1734:

Our Laws prohibit Hunting To the Plebeian race,

The Dinner', 1787, one of a set of six etchings by Thomas Rowlandson.

Nor is it meet the Vulgar Should Royal Sports debase.

Contact with the 'Plebeian race' on the race course was to be avoided. 'Peasantry is a disease (like the Plague) easily to be caught by conversation', William Dare11 advised a young nobleman in 1764. Woot- ton, who was regarded by envious rivals as a sycophantic snob, would have agreed.

Even in his lifetime Wooton's socially exclusive grand vision had ceased to bear much relation to reality. Neither George I nor George II hunted or went to race meetings. Hunting was less the preserve of the great nobility. The great country !louse and its connection with hunting promin- ent for example in Siberecht's 'Longleat House' (1678)— recedes from the canvasses of James Seymour (1702-1752), the first sporting artist to make a living as such. The Woottonian grand manner with its moral and social overtones, its echoes of the Great Masters, gave way to a descriptive, narrative art.

This was in part a response to the technical advances which culminated in the Meynellian revolution (Meynell was Mas- ter of the Quorn 1753-1800) which turned foxhunting into what its practitioners call- ed a 'science'. The impact of this revolu- tion Deuchar underestimates. Patrons wanted to see science reflected in art. Wootton tells us little about what goes on in hunting; Seymour the 'modernist' does. Wootton's lofty image could not resist the intrusion of reality; it was at odds with the perception of rural sports among the 'out- siders'. Far from eschewing the vices of the city, sportsmen ruined themselves on the turf, drank to excess and sang bawdy songs. Rowlandson's 'The Dinner' reveals foxhunters as drunken slobs. Patricians and plebeians rubbed shoulders at race meetings, blurring the social distances that Wootton had sought to maintain. All this, combined with the bitter controversy over the Game Laws, shocked a public opinion influenced by what has been called a 'moral revolution', that emphasis on polite manners that characterised the 1760s. 'In the lower ranks of mankind we must not expect refinement', Vicesimus Knox warned in 1782; and it was sportsmen who exhibited a singular lack of refinement. The world, William Shenstone wrote, was divided into 'people who read, people who write, people who think and foxhunt- ers'. The 'insiders' got on with their sport and patronised the descriptive art of Seymour and Sartorius. The 'moral major- ity' considered such art a reflection of an unsavoury side of English life. Pundits like Reynolds considered it a bastard genre and dismissed those who practised it as 'mere copiers of nature'.

Then came the great George Stubbs (1724-1806). His art challenged contem- porary criticism: rural sports were pre- sented as calm and dignified. His racing pictures deny the social promiscuity and rowdiness of the race meeting. Yet, as Deuchar points out, there is a curious ambiguity in Stubbs. In his famous picture of the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper, Freeman, killing a doe, are we meant to admire Freeman's efficient dispatch of the prey or empathise with the deer as it looks at us in suffering?

Stubbs resented the lowly status of 'animal painters' who suffered from the shortcomings of their patrons. Colonel Thornton, one of the most important purchasers of sporting art, was a libertine whose taste is reflected in his comment that the horses of San Marco pale by compari- son with Garrard's plaster cows. Yet Stubbs failed to slough off the stigma that attached to 'animal painters'. He never made full membership of the Royal Academy.

Stubbs had no successors in his strivings to elevate sporting art. It no longer needed elevation. The 1790s saw a dramatic turn- about in the public vision of rural sports. Those boisterous and rowdy aspects of hunting that had distressed the moral majority were now seen as proofs of British manliness in wars with the degenerate unsporting French; old arguments that the hunting field was a training ground for war were refurbished. Artists could now risk presenting hunting for what it was and they found an enduring popularity. Disapproba- tion persisted but Aiken and Leech still hang on pub walls. Francis Grant, who hunted and painted in Leicestershire, was knighted and became President of the Royal Academy in 1866. But respectability ruins art. Most 19th-century hunting pic- tures are drearily descriptive.

All these changes are traced with an erudition that never ceases to astonish. Sometimes its implications astonish too. Like so many 'outsiders' who write on hunting, Stephen Deuchar sees sexual con- notations which those who hunt, hardly surprisingly, fail to suspect. A recent writer on bided sports asserts that 'no great insight' is needed to see that the 'tails' of foxes and otters are phallic symbols attached to 'traditionally sexy beasts that dwell in holes'. Stephen Deuchar sees guns as sexual symbols. Perhaps a tail is just a tail and a gun is just a gun. Sometimes simple explanations are in order. For example, the author argues that the remov- al of a hunting picture from public view in the great hall, as at Badminton, to the billiard room, as at Ammerdown, may represent the increasing insularity and the privatisation of the sporting world that could no longer boast the universal values of Wootton. It may be that there was no more room for Wootton's large canvasses. Dukes couldn't go on building great halls forever.

If the world is still divided between those who read, write and think and those who hunt, then this dense, difficult book will not be seen in the libraries of foxhunters. But it will be required reading for all social historians as well as for connoisseurs.