Oil on Canvas; A Hunting Scene, Circle of Francis Sartorius I (British, 1734-1804)
This bucolic representation of the English countryside, animated by a hunting scene in the foreground, is characteristic of the tradition for sporting pictures that developed in Britain across the eighteenth century and counted among its exponents masters of the calibre of George Stubbs (1724-1806) and, into the twentieth century, Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959).
The composition, with the tree on the left acting as repoussoir – a device used to create perspectival depth, borrowed from the pastoral landscapes of French seventeenth-century painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin – no doubt portrayed a specific location, with its church, sporting grounds and whitewashed house adjoining an earlier building in the centre. Paintings of this type were regularly commissioned by the owners of country residences, members of the nobility as well as landed gentry – many of whom would have enjoyed hunting – to immortalise their estates as part of the fabric of the national landscape. The demand was such that several artists in eighteenth-century Britain, including émigré European ones, specialised primarily in this field, which remains to this day indissolubly associated with the aesthetic of the British country house.
Prominent among them was Francis Sartorius (also known as Francis Sartorius I, or Senior, to distinguish him from a grandchild who became a marine painter), whose ancestor Jacob Christoph Sartorius (fl. 1694–1737) had been an engraver in the German city of Nuremberg. The family settled in London in the early eighteenth-century thanks to the enterprise of John, Francis Sr.’s father, who reputedly practiced as an animal painter, but it is only with Francis Sr. and, later, with his son John Nost (1759–1829), that the name Sartorius became established in Britain. A prolific painter of animals and sporting scenes, Francis Sr. regularly submitted pictures to exhibitions at the Society of Artists, the Free Society, and the Royal Academy in London. He was based in Soho, like many artists of his generation, but often travelled out of town to race meetings and country estates, where patrons commissioned from him portraits of their best horses and hounds. He counted the Duke of Cumberland and Lord Rockingham among his clients, and he is credited with having been one of the first sporting artists to visit and paint in Ireland, specifically for Edward Stratford, 2nd Earl of Aldborough, at Baltinglass, co. Wicklow (1787). In Britain, the National Trust holds many examples of Sartorius’ work in its collection, primarily at Antony – a Georgian house in Cornwall – but also at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, at Fenton House in London, and at Upton House in Warwickshire. In the United States, the Yale Center for British Art owns Sartorius’ Sir Charles Warre Malet’s String of Racehorses at Exercise (fig. 1), a sweeping view of the English countryside with a sporting theme in the foreground that can be compared in configuration to the present canvas. A collection of four, even more closely comparable compositions by Sartorius can be found at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, which document the phases of a day out hunting with hounds, against a backdrop of rolling hills (figs. 2-5)
Height: 97cm, 38 1/4″
Width: 153cm, 60 1/4″
£16,000