This is probably George Stubbs’s most famous painting.
It is an old-fashioned English deer hunt with hounds, a sport that was largely replaced with mounted fox hunts.
This painting also goes a long way to describing what often happened at rural West Virginia foxhounds trials that my grandfather attended. It was not unusual for a large section of the dogs released to take off after a deer and kill it, while their sucker counterparts took off after a red fox that they’d never catch.
This painting done at the Grosvenor family estate called Eaton in Cheshire. The Grosvenors became one of the largest landowning families in England, and their current descendant, the 6th Duke of Westminster, is the richest British-born person.
Hunting in deer parks in the eighteenth century was a rich man’s game, but this was also the heyday of the poacher. These wealthy landowners didn’t spend all their time on one estate, and they simply couldn’t police it all. The rural poor, whose families had often been driven off the land, poached deer for their own tables, and those with a more entrepreneurial bend would sell the venison to butchers. Indeed, at this time, there was as strong connection between butchers and poachers, who were essentially thriving in a black market economy.
The nearby Aylesbury Vale hunt used to cheekily enter our property following their hounds and were very rude to any member if the family who asked them to leave, but that all ended in 2004 when hunting with dogs was banned. Some hunts still kept their packsa together because the Tories promised to bring back hunting if elected. Unfortiunately for them they subsequently had to form a coalition with the liberal democrats who are anti hunting.
Nice historical piece Scottie.
Wow, I’m using a public computer, and when I clicked Leave a Reply, my name and email address was already written here from yesterday. Not good.
Hunts can better be done by a person or a person on horseback dragging a scented cloth – that way the hounds go where they are welcome and not across busy roads. You can use lion scent or hippo scent – any animal scent which is NOT found in your area.
Sorry to hear about any decline in foxhound numbers, I am a big fan of dogs who can live peacefully in packs. Packs of foxhounds could be a good outcross breed for many other breeds because their are good in parks and with families (if raised there) and are much easier to care for by the breeder, because, as said before, they live well as a pack, so individual kennels are not needed.
sorry about the below, not my computer and I don’t have the extra moments right now to learn to erase on this one – which is quite different. And can’t see what I’m typeing as the comment box now cover
Hunts came be better done with a person, or a person on
My uncle was a horseman and member of a Hunt in Pennsylvania. I remember seeing the captive fox they used to supply scent for the drag. (The fox’s bedding straw in a burlap,bag). All hunts were drag hunts, so that they could use known terrain and land where thay had permission. That was back in the 1950s. Mr Fox was as well cared for as the hounds– and beautiful dogs they were.