THE NATIONAL SPORTING LIBRARY NEWSLETTER,
Fall 2002

SOJOURN: MELLON ART ON LOAN FROM YALE
by Lisa Campbell

Sojourn at Home: Sporting Paintings from the Paul Mellon Bequest to the Yale Center for British Art, a new exhibit at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, opened to the public on October 7, as part of the Forrest E. Mars Sr. Exhibition Series.

"This show captures the essence of British sporting art so loved by Mellon," said Walta Warren, NSL curator.

The exhibit will present 16 works by seven highly regarded sporting artists including John Ferneley Sr., John Frederick Herring Sr., Alfred J. Munnings, Henry Thomas Alken, Lionel Edwards, H. Raoul Mallais and James Dunthorne. The paintings will be displayed on the main floor of the Library including the Paul Mellon foyer, the Founders' Room and the main reading room.

The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., has generously loaned the works to the Library, many of which were once displayed in Mellon's private museum, the Brick House, near Upperville.

Paintings in the Library's show date from 1765 to the early 20th century. The most noble painting in the exhibit is Study of a Saddled Bay Hunter (1828) by John Ferneley Sr. (1782-1860). This beautiful portrait of a solid, sensible hunter once graced the main hall of the Brick House. The alert gelding reflects a kind eye yet appears fit and keen for the field. The beauty of the painting is its simplicity; the only subject is the bay horse, with a background of naples yellow. Warren chose the Bay Hunter for the exhibition's poster.

Ferneley painted numerous portraits of hunters and racehorses, and several hunt scurries. These large panoramic scurries depict the open English countryside with fences and gnarled trees and several members of the field at full gallop, some meeting mishap.

Two other oil paintings in the show by Ferneley are Thomas Wilkinson, MFH, with the Hurworth Foxhounds (1833) and an oil on canvas of Edward Horner Reynard grouse shooting with his brother and the game keeper dated 1836.

Three fabulous paintings by Alfred J. Munnings (1878-1959) are in the show. Two are portraits commissioned by the Earl of Derby of his outstanding racehorses Hyperion and Fairway after they were retired to stud. Hyperion was undefeated, winning the Derby, the St. Leger and the Prince of Wales Stakes at Ascot. He sired a number of famous racehorses, and Mellon's Thoroughbred, Mill Reef, winner of the Epson Derby, traces back to Hyperion. The third Munnings work on exhibit is The Start (1950), an active image of several racehorses with jockeys in colorful silks at the starting line.

President of the Royal Academy from 1944-1959, Munnings is best known for his paintings of country sports, especially foxhunting and horseracing. Over a 60-year period, he exhibited nearly 300 works at the R.A. Summer Exhibitions. The NSL holds a number of books on his work, including his three-volume autobiography.

Henry Thomas Alken (1785-1851) is represented in the exhibit with two paintings, Duck Shooting and Grouse Shooting. Alken worked under the pseudonym "Ben Tally Ho" early in his career but later resumed his own name. He produced a number of sketches and paintings of racing, hunting, coaching and other country sports. He wrote The Beauties and Defects in the Figure of a Horse (1816), The National Sports of Great Britain (1821), plus numerous sketch books, many of which are in the NSL's rare book room.

John Frederick Herring Sr. (1795-1865) painted a series of four oils which show the four important stages of hound work. The Suffolk Hunt-Going to Cover near Harringswell, Going Away, Full Cry, and The Death are each approximately 11 x 15. The huntsman riding his gray hunter appears in all except the last where the gray looks on as the huntsman tries to pull aloft the fox out of the hounds' reach.

Herring, born in Surrey, began a career as a coachman at the age of 19 but after seven years, he devoted his time to painting a number of highly regarded works. His engravings were published in The Annals of Sporting, and in 1815, The Doncaster Gazette commissioned him to sketch the annual winner of the St. Leger stakes. (Thanks to the generosity of the NSL Board Member Jacqueline B. Mars, the NSL has a rare folio-size copy of Herring's Portraits of the Winner of the St. Leger Stakes, published in 1824.)

The oldest painting in the show is a humorous one of an unusual foxhunting incident by James Dunthorne (1730-1815) and commissioned by John Sidey, master of the pack. In John Sidey and His Hounds at a Farmhouse Near Hadleigh, Suffolk (1765), a fox has leaped off the roof of a farmhouse and the hounds are boiling over the roof in hot pursuit. Sidey is astride a gray hunter with others nearby watching the scene unfold. In a note signed by Sidey reads: "The occurrence represented in this picture really happened."

A large and scenic oil by Lionel Edwards (1878-1966) depicts the green open English countryside with a foxhunt spread through it. The painting, The Quorn running towards Quenby Hall (1949), shows the hounds in fully cry, having just made a left hand turn on the line with the hunt staff and field following.

Edwards foxhunted with nearly every pack in England and was frequently commissioned to capture the hunts he followed on canvas. Early in his career, he studied with Arthur Stockdale Cope (1857-1940), at Heatherly School in London and with W. Frank Calderon's school in Kensington. In the NSL's collection, Edwards's illustrations appear in 115 books.

The last painting is of Mellon himself, Paul Mellon on Knight of Galtees- North Cotswold. Mellon had commissioned H. Raoul Millais (1901-1999) to paint him on Makista, his beloved steeplechase mare.

"I wanted to be painted riding in a point-to-point on my successful mare Makista, but Millais turned up bearing a camera at the wrong point-to-point," writes Mellon in his autobiography Reflections in a Silver Spoon (1992). "Instead of Makista, I was mounted on Knight of the Galtees, a horse I had bought a year earlier from Liz Whitney."

Mellon hunted Knight then sent him to England with some of his other hunters. The horse handled himself well in the field so Mellon decided to try him in a point-to-point. Part way through the race, he realized that the horse was falling behind the pack. They finished 25 lengths behind the next horse and Knight was making a "terrible roaring noise." He never raced the horse again and gave him to a family as a children's hunter. Later he contacted trainer Jock Whitney and described the horse's sad performance. Mellon recalls Whitney's reply, "I don't wonder. I retired him because he had a shockingly bad heart." Mellon arranged to have the horse vetted and Knight was put down soon after.

Mellon didn't receive the painting until 40 years later when he hung it in his sporting library at Oak Spring, his residence with his wife Rachel "Bunny" Mellon. "It is a pretty good portrait of the horse," he writes. "But I've often wondered what would have happened if he had fallen dead on me."

Mellon, a 1929 graduate of Yale, conceived the Center for British Art, an institution he built for the study of British art. According to the Yale committee established to set policy for it, the center was to be devoted to "British culture and society within the period 1625-1850, with the Paul Mellon Collection of British Art as the focal point." It opened in 1977 with holdings of over 300 paintings, 1,000 drawings and prints and 5,000 rare books donated by Mellon.

":My interest in British art is part of my fascination with British life and history," writes Mellon in Reflections in a Silver Spoon. "I grew to love English country life and country sports. All these interests converged to make me ready to collect paintings, drawings, books and prints, wherever the subject matter is related to English life in the 18th and early 19th centuries."

Judy Egerton, author of British Sporting and Animal Paintings 1655-1867, The Paul Mellon Collection (1978), aptly describes the genre: "British sporting art derives its character from the same source as that other British specialty, the open air portrait. Both reflect a taste for informality, an idealization of leisure and a love of country life."