STAND in the main foyer of the National Gallery in London and look to your right, through two arches into rooms that contain fusty Renaissance allegorical paintings. There on a wall, 100 yards away, is the finest life-size equestrian portrait ever done. It is Whistlejacket (1762) by George Stubbs, which has been described as “a romantic study in solitude and liberty”. Its sabulous background helps to give the viewer inspiration for wild dreams and far horizons.
Go then to the Burrell Collection in Glasgow and admire Joseph Crawhall’s Foxhounds – Jingling Gate (1885). This, too, is the finest work of its genre. In his memoir The Life of a Painter, Sir John Lavery wrote of Crawhall: ‘If he did a pack of hounds, the huntsman would be able to recognise every single one, even when it was only indicated in half a dozen marks.’ What is all the more remarkable is that neither artist hunted nor sat on a horse.
But there is a band of artists whose work has been informed bythe characteristics and movements of both from the ground. Their works may not hang on the walls of national galleries but many have found their way, through smaller exhibitions or private commissions, into the homes of people to whom art is an important pleasure and record of their sport.
