THE NATIONAL SPORTING LIBRARY NEWSLETTER,
Spring 2000

FOXHOUND PAINTINGS GEMS OF NSL'S COLLECTION
by Peter Winants, Director Emeritus

Next to books, visitors to the National Sporting Library find the sporting art on display a highlight. Paintings in the lobby and Founders Room of English foxhunting and racing in the early 1800s by John Ferneley and Ben Marshall are on loan from Mrs. Stephen C. Clark Jr.; the decor of the stacks on the main floor is enhanced by a painting by famed British animal artist George Stubbs and two paintings by Franklin B. Voss, the dean of American equine painters. And there's much more.

However, for many visitors, the number one attraction, art wise, is a grouping on the exterior wall of the director's office of seven 9" x 12" paintings of foxhounds by lesser-known American artist Gustav Muss-Arnolt. The hounds are informally positioned, not posed as in hound shows. One is a near head-on perspective, others with side angles and one from the rear. This informality makes for realism; the paintings are like a visit to a foxhound kennel, when, after the excitement of your presence subsides, the hounds relax and assume an assortment of postures.

Muss-Arnolt lived in the vicinity of New York City in 1858-1927. He was a director of the American Kennel Club and a much-in-demand judge of dog shows in the United States and abroad. His dog portraits appeared in Harper's Weekly and in the collections of the owners of sporting dogs. He was virtually the Frank Voss of the dog world.

The hounds in Muss-Arnolt's pictures were members in 1885 of the Meadow Brook pack on Long Island, New York. Reproductions of the seven paintings appear in J. Blan van Urk's fine book The Story of American Foxhunting, Volume II (The Derrydale Press, 1941). The frontispiece in the same book has a reproduction of Muss-Arnolt's painting of Meadow Brook's followers and hounds in 1885. The foxhunter include August Belmont II, the hunt's master. Belmont later became the president of the National Steeplechase Association and chairman of The Jockey Club, but he's best known as the breeder of Man o'War.

Theodore Roosevelt, mounted on his trusty hunter, Frank, is also in the painting. This, of course, was prior to Roosevelt's better-known activities, like big-game hunting, rough riding, and big-stick waving. One of the Library's prize possessions is Roosevelt's original, hand-corrected manuscript of his article, "Foxhunting on Long Island," which appeared in Century magazine in 1886. John and Martha Daniels donated the priceless manuscript to the NSL in 1994.

The late Harry T. Peters Jr., of Orange, Virginia, was the donor in 1973 of the hound pictures. Peters inherited them from his father, Harry T. Peters Sr., the master of the Meadow Brook Hunt in 1925 until the demise of the hunt in 1946 due to the urbanization of its hunting country. Peters Sr. was the author of Just Hunting (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), a delightful description of hunting in the United States and England.

Peters was also the world's foremost scholar and collector of Currier and Ives prints. Doubleday, Doran and Co. published Peters's two-volume work, Currier and Ives, Printmakers to the American People, in 1929 and 1931, and the NSL's collection also has Peters's America on Stone, the Other Printmakers of the American People. The Museum of the City of New York received some 6,000 Currier and Ives prints upon the death of Mr. Peters Sr. at age 52 in 1949.