ART: Not such a dark horse
British Sporting Art at Christie’s
‘Sporting art’ is, the more one ponders it, a strange category, but the reasons for this have nothing to do with sport, and everything to do with art and its present-day high-cultural conventions. Thinking of art primarily in terms of subject-matter pulls, after all, against the formal, historical and nationalist concerns of the past two centuries — even more so against the largely functionalist concerns which held sway prior to that — and in doing so, confers on sporting art a strange half-kinship with ‘war art’. Both do well in clubs, country houses and auction rooms, yet both are generally cold-shouldered by an art establishment that hardly knows what to do with them, conceptually or curatorially.
This unpalatable cocktail of disdain, misunderstanding and neglect, as it happens, explains why the British Sporting Arts Trust was founded in 1977, and why Christie’s is celebrating the BSAT’s 25th anniversary with British Sporting Art (closes Wednesday 22 January). In the decades prior to the establishment of the BSAT, the prestige of British sporting art has reached a low ebb. Hard though it may be to imagine, artists of the quality of Stubbs and Landseer were either forgotten or treated as historical curiosities. Even the great Ellis Waterhouse, saviour of so much unloved British painting, could hardly bring himself to address the topic. In his Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters (1981), for instance, his entry on the Sartorius family reads as follows: 'four generations of rather dreary and very prolific horse and sporting painters, whose exhibition records it is impossible to sort out'. Meanwhile Anglophiles abroad — not least, that fine horseman and exemplary philanthropist Paul Mellon — were buying up the art that British art-historians had forgotten how to love.
The BSAT was set up by a group of enthusiasts, aided by Tate Gallery director, Sir Norman Reid. Their mission was clear enough:
to advance the public education in the fine arts, particularly that branch of painting known as British Sporting Art, and in furtherance of this object the Trustees shall manage and maintain a collection of paintings, prints, books and other items relating to the subject for presentation or loan to art galleries for showing to the public in any manner.
And this they have attempted, with considerable success, over 25 years. One of their main achievements has been the garnering of some pretty spectacular donations. In 1979, Paul Mellon generously presented thirty paintings — some of them very good paintings indeed — to the Tate Gallery; soon afterwards, the widow of another American collector, Ambrose Clark, followed suit with a gift of seventeen significant works. It says something for the stature of sporting art at the time that these two gifts alone more than doubled the Tate's holding of sporting and animal paintings. Many more bequests followed; exhibitions have been arranged; a small museum has been opened at Newmarket, essays commissioned; a library of books and prints developed, and prizes awarded for the best new sporting art. And above all else, the BSAT has been a minor but persistent irritant in the face of the Tate’s vast complacency — a quiet voice insisting that not all sporting art should be sold off, given away or flung into the deepest storage.
This, then, is what British Sporting Art, currently at Christie’s, is intended to celebrate. The BSAT has loaned works for the exhibition; so have many sympathetic individuals, and while not every work on show is a masterpiece, a surprising number are. The catalogue, scholarly and entertaining in equal measure, does justice to all. Containing 150 colour illustrations of the over 230 works on show, together with an introduction by Francis Russell and short biographies of the artists represented, it is likely to become a reference work of some importance. In short, this is a better survey of British sporting art than we are likely to see for some time to come, and is thus highly recommended.
Of course, like any such exhibition, it has its fair share of questionable hanging decisions. There is, for instance, much eighteenth and nineteenth century art, but little from after 1900, and virtually nothing later than 1950. Sport includes hunting, flat racing, two cricket batsmen, one boxing match and some hint at golf, but no tennis, rugby, football or — well, anything else, and although this may fairly represent the nature of sporting art, the questions that raises are interesting enough to deserve answers, not silence. Inevitably, several paintings seem to have been included for fairly arbitrary reasons. Why, for instance, do dogs per se count as a sport? A Study of Foxhounds by Jacques Laurent Agasse makes some sense in this context — but what of the elegant portrait of Muff, a sort of proto-papillion, standing in an Arcadian landscape punctuated with a small temple? 'Sport' is hardly what comes to mind; surely Van Dyck's aristocratic portraits are the model here? There is also a painting by James Pollard of the Bath & Bristol Mail Coach, seen by moonlight. Is driving mail coaches by moonlight a sport? Or was it simply unclear under what other circumstances one might show this likeable, if technically haphazard little picture?
Never mind — you'd have to have a heart of stone to complain much either about Muff or the mail-coach. Meanwhile there are some really magnificent paintings here, including no less than seven paintings by one of the greatest painters Britain ever produced, George Stubbs. Of these, two stand out. One shows a landowner and his gamekeeper riding in near-silhouette in front of a frieze-like forest. The trees, dark and linear, create the sort of barrier one finds in Bellini’s Death of St Peter Martyr — but without the relief of any open horizon or the explicit action-scene of the martyrdom. Meanwhile, the faces of the two men are unremittingly grim. Given that one of them presumably commissioned the work, this decision is as interesting as the psychological intimations provided by the artist. It is hard not to think of man-traps, prison hulks and transportation — which shows again, in another way, how broad the ambit of ‘sporting art’ can be. Yet another Stubbs, in the same room, tells a different sort of story. It is called Dungannon, The Property of Colonel O'Kelly, Painted In A Paddock With A Sheep. A handsome thoroughbred stands in a paddock, tall and muscular and groomed to perfection — and next to him, painted with just as much seriousness and sensitivity, is a sheep. Apparently the two could not bear to be separated. The owner’s initials are sheered into the sheep’s fleece. It’s a dignified, tranquil, surreal and yet strangely inspiring work, speaking volumes about the strange bonds that link our various species — the possibilities for kindness and affection surmounting all sorts of differences. And this, again, has something to say about sport in its fullest sense. It's a seriously great work, unimaginable in any other country or from any other painter — as great as Hogarth's Shrimp Girl, certainly. Yet it tells all sorts of truths the arts establishment might like to forget. The Shrimp Girl is, after all, about a property-owning male view of a working-class girl; Dungannon is about Ireland, livestock, the countryside and the sweeter eccentricities of agrarian life. Which one ends up in a national collection? And where's the surprise in that?
Many of the works, unsurprisingly, relate to hunting. And here, as with the marvellous Munnings show at Sotheby’s a few years ago, the exhibition has a faintly polemical feel — amplified, I’d have thought, by the naked hostility to field-sports that cropped up in several published reviews of the exhibition. It takes an effort of will to remember that in the happier age when these works were commissioned and painted, hunting was largely unproblematic, and hence these works were loved not for their formal qualities, or — as Munnings often is today — for somehow standing as a reproach to modernity, classlessness, urban values, democracy and art-historical modernism, but for their documentary and indeed talismanic powers. Hence a painting — technically facile, but radiating earnest regard — of Thomas Oldaker, 32 years huntsman to the Old Berkeley Hounds, on his brown mare Pickle with hounds Maleburn and Romper, and hence a painting of T. Tyrwhitt Drake and his hounds, rendered so carefully that one can hardly doubt that each of the hounds could have been picked out by name by the Master a decade later.
But then there are also several stunning works by Sir Alfred Munnings, a much more interesting and varied artist than many tend to assume. Of course he was no more exempt from the long aching headache of modernism than any of his contemporaries; however forcibly he struggled against it, he knew modernism was there, and did what he did not in the absence of it, but in spite of it. He didn’t always escape it, either. In The Hon. William Astor, a very free oil sketch, the flurry of hounds’ tails is both a literal rendering, and a memory of the repetitive blur and dazzle so beloved of the Vorticists and Futurists. His sketch of two girls on their ponies is so free and fast and stirring that it rapidly becomes an essay in the relationship between cinnebar and teal blue — held back from abstraction only by the same superstitions that restrained Picasso. Does this mean that Munnings was a failure or a fraud? Of course not. It is simply an indication of Munnings’ technical skill and of the profundity of his investment in the world he painted. Set aside for a moment those silly drunken comments about Picasso, and think instead about his actual corpus of work. The efforts of the BSAT and some staggering auction prices notwithstanding, he’s hardly fashionable. Yet I’d be amazed if, fifty years hence, he wasn’t considered one of the greatest British artists of the past century — far more serious and subtle than the over-rated David Hockney, for one.
One other hunting work deserves specific mention. There are two very fine Landseers in this exhibition. One is a fluid sketch of the young Queen Victoria, mounted — again, nothing much to do with sport, but in its treatment of horseflesh, a splendid example of the freedom and the rigour of Landseer’s drawing, so obviously based not only on knowledge of Rubens and Gros, but of real anatomy, too. The other, though, is unforgettable. It’s a hounds’-eye view of a cornered and wounded fox. There is nothing in the picture but fox and grass, seen from a vantage-point close above the injured animal — glaring back half in fury and half in terror, mouth open, obviously knowing its time is up but never more alive than in this moment. It’s called The Last Run of the Season and it catches the viewer by the throat. My companion at the exhibition, a strong advocate of hunting, turned away — ‘I don’t like Landseer. I don’t know why, but I just don’t like him.’ It’s a strange work, because at one level we can’t help but read it now as an urban-lefty-abolitionist vision of fieldsports, and yet at the same time we know perfectly well it was painted and purchased by people who not only approved of hunting but who quite possibly could not imagine the world without it. So it was not only a wise decision, from an art-historical point of view, to include this technically more or less flawless work — but also a brave one, intellectually and ideologically. Having seen the work before in reproduction, I can promise you that the actual painting has a completely different level of impact.
What else? I could go on listing works all day, but that rather misses the point. The charm, the interest, the importance of this show reposes more in the smaller, less masterful works than in the greater ones, since it’s the latter one’s likely to see in public any time soon. There are astounding incidental landscapes, dreamlike and unavoidably English; there are spirited crowd scenes; there are different sorts of hunting horns; there are odd bits and bridles; there’s a painting of the Brierley Turk, who was not only one of the three imported stallions who form the basis of today’s studbook, but who also carried his master at the Battle of the Boyne; finally, there’s a stupendous, tiny painting of ferreting — a horrible sport, in some ways, but redeemed here by some of the loveliest painting I’ve seen for a very long time. All of which, once again, makes a point about ‘sporting art’.
Critics who have written about this show have — almost to a man — ended up nervously meditating out loud over why one might possibly justify liking this stuff. Is it for its formal qualities? Is it for its value as social history? Gosh, it’s all very difficult, this art business, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. As with war art — and the parallel is a persuasive one — no matter how much the art establishment fails to get a grip on it, sporting art will continue to find an audience amongst people who like it for a complex tangle of reasons which hinge on one main topos — the experience itself, in all its richness and variety and paradox. Today, these old paintings remind us of the vanished world in which they were painted, and qualities of that world we may well miss. This is unavoidably the case. Those Stubbs paintings of horses are now about property, hierarchy and order as much as they are about anything else, which is — for some of us, anyway — no small part of their charm. Yet at the same time, they also remind those who love them of aspects of that 'vanished' world that remain largely unchanged despite the passage, in some cases, of centuries — of the flatness of Newmarket, the acrid mist of a January morning in the field, the thrill of a close finish, the burnished flank of a healthy mare, or the moist muzzle of a beloved hound. It takes technical skill for an artist to convey these things, but also understanding and sympathy — and it takes more than a grasp of art history and formal criticism for the viewer to get much out of them. So if there’s an insufficiency here, it is neither in painter nor viewer. It is in the arts establishment, with its limited purview and its occasionally insane arrogance. British Sporting Art is a fine show, and a worthy tribute to the BSAT. It is also, however, a stinging reproach to far too many galleries, funding bodies and university art departments today — not so much suggesting that what they do is wrong, as insisting on their myopia and ultimate irrelevance — their denial of the ways in which people actually use art, or at any rate their evangelical insistence that people ought be able to be schooled to use it better.
Sporting Art in Britain: A Loan Exhibition to celebrate 25 Years of the British Sporting Art Trust is at Christie's King Street until 22 January 2003, from 9 am - 4 pm — ring 020 7839 9060 for details.
Bunny Smedley is ERO’s arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, January 20, 2003 11:57 AM