George Stubbs

Two Gentlemen Shooting
c. 1769
39 x 49 in. (99.1 x 124.5 cm)

A gentle Gale that blows along the Land
The Game betrays; the Dogs they Draw, the Stand:
Search all the Objects that afford delight,
There's none like this can please the Fowlers sight;

Softly they Step expecting instant Sport,
The Covey springs to find some safe resort;
Like Lightning flys the Shot, one falls to th'Ground,
The rest well mark'd, again are to be found.

These scenes from a day's sport are set around Creswell Crags, steep limestone formations on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. In the Crags were caves containing the remains of prehistoric animals, as well as tools and weapons that were some of the oldest signs of human life in Britain. With their primeval and savage associations, they clearly appealed to Stubbs's imagination, and he used them as the setting for some of his paintings of horses attacked by lions (two of which are also exhibited here in the Library Court). In the Shooting Series, where he shows them prominently in the first scene and in the distance in thr fourth, they serve to suggest the idea of the hunt as an age-old human endeavor: the protagonists of Stubbs's series may be eighteenth-century city gentlemen but, they are literally following in the footsteps of early mankind. The verses on the frames accompanied the series when it was published as a set of prints in 1769-71; they focus on the time of day with which each scene is associated, from misty dawn to the shadows of evening.
    The paintings were not exhibited as a group in Stubbs's lifetime, but rather individually (but in order) at the Society of Artists in 1767, 1768, 1769, and 1770. Paul Mellon gave the series of four pictures, celebrating the pleasures of companionship in sport, to the Center in memory of his own foxhunting companion and friend from his student years at Yale, James Cox Brady.