THE NATIONAL SPORTING LIBRARY NEWSLETTER,
Fall 2000

TREASURES FEATURED IN NEW EXHIBIT
by Elizabeth Manierre, Exhibits Curator

Beginning in October, the Forrest E. Mars Senior Exhibit Hall will showcase dozens of treasures selected from the rare book room of the National Sporting Library. Art Between Hard Covers, which opens on Friday the 13th of October, will present fifty of the rarest or most beautiful illustrations to be found in the Library's collections of rare books, prints, and original art.

"This exhibit represents an extraordinary opportunity for those who love sporting art," says NSL Director Kenneth Tomlinson. "Never before has the public had the chance to view all of these books this way-we keep them under lock and key and access to them is necessarily limited. Now these treasures will be open for all to experience."

About 3000 volumes are shelved in the Library's F. Ambrose Clark Rare Book Room--the cream of the John Daniels, von Huenersdorff, Lord Lonsdale and other collections. Amusing, instructive, sometimes poignant, these sporting images present themselves in a variety of media represented in the exhibition. Most common of these are the engraved and lithographic prints included in published volumes to illustrate a story, diagram a technique or portray a scientific discovery. The Library's holdings of such work are vast, and the score of prints chosen for the show comprises but a tiny fraction to be found among its rare books. Some of these volumes are classics - the social satire of John Leech, foxhunting scenes by Henry Alken, John James Audubon's Birds of America - chosen for exhibition because they epitomize the tradition of sporting illustration. One of the Library's most important acquisitions in recent years, the engravings in Winners of the Great Saint Leger Stakes after J.F. Herring's immortal portraits of great English Thoroughbred racehorses, will be on public display for the first time since the NSL obtained it.

The show has its share of delightful prints by less-well-known artists as well, depicting a variety of sport and natural history. John Gould's Icones Avium, a collection of newly discovered bird species, rivals the work of more-famous John James Audubon for accuracy and beauty. Also on view are J. and T. Doughty's Cabinet of Natural History: America Rural Sports, and J.T. Rawlins's very fine illustrations for Lawrence Rawstorne's Gamonia: or, the Art of Preserving Game; and an Improved Method of Making Plantations and Covers.

Samuel Alken's illustrations join those of J.R. Cruikshank in Pierce Egan's Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected: Including Numerous Characteristic Portraits of Persons of Every Walk of Life, Who Have Acquired Notoriety from Their Achievements on the Turf, at the Table, and in Diversions of the Field, With Sketches of Various Animals of the Chase... Also on view is The Roadster's Album, a rare and humorous volume of hand-colored aquatints by C.B. Newhouse, an artist who confined himself almost exclusively to scenes of mail and stage coaching and sport driving. The book is an excellent example of Newhouse's work, as his images usually portray the speed associated with the open road, and the calamity or comedy that speed can bring about.

Though famous for their book illustration, Cruikshank, Leech and Alken are also represented in the show in a different format: along side the books on exhibit are a half-dozen "panorama" prints from the nineteenth century, ranging up to almost thirty feet in length. These novelties commemorated special events like a royal procession, or provided a novel or comic view of sporting life. Panoramas were wound around a wooden spindle and stored as scrolls, or folded accordion-style between cardboard covers.

The six examples on view are displayed along the walls of the gallery, unfolded to the greatest extent possible, to expose footage that is rarely seen by the public. They include the grand Chasse Impériale à Fountainebleau: Grande Panorama Colorié la Cour et de sa Suite de Chevaliers, Meutes, Piqueurs, Sites Pittoresques et Pèripèties de Chasse [The Royal Hunt at Fontainebleau: A Grand Panorama Embellished with the Court and Followed by Knights, a Crowd, Galloping Horses, with a Description and Adventures of the Hunt], and The Splendid Procession of Queen Victoria to Her Coronation, on the 28th of June 1838, Displaying Every Portion of the Royal Cortege, on That Memorable Occasion, As Well As the Whole Line of Streets, with Their Numerous Decoration, from the Duke of York's Pillar to Her Majesty's Entrance at Westminster Abbey. Also on view are the more humorous Going to Epsom Races: A Ludicrous Amusement Consisting of Modern Costume, Characters, Dandies, Equipages and Horsemanship by Henry Thomas Alken, Coming Home [from the Races]: A Comic Panorama by John Leech, and Robert Cruikshank's, Going to a Fight: Exhibiting the Sporting World Fifty Years Ago, in All Its Variety of Style and Costume, Along the Road from Hyde Park Corner to Moulsey Hurst.

Along with panoramas, three-dimensional "peep shows" were popular amusements of the nineteenth century. Art Between Hard Covers includes four examples open for viewing, depicting stag and foxhunting and racing. Most striking is a double view of the Thames River, above and beneath the surface- twin passageways immortalized by Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which a wild bull appears on the road, "his two nostrils like the Thames Tunnel as seen in the perspective toys of yore." Folded flat for storage, such ephemera are seldom seen open by the public.

Another curiosities on display are over a dozen examples of the rare art of "fore-edge painting" from the John H. Daniels collection. The pages of a fore-edge-painted book are decorated in such a manner that the image remains completely invisible under a layer of page-edge gilt when the book is closed, but appears when the leaves of the volume are fanned open. This form of illustration probably first appeared in England during the mid-seventeenth century. Common subjects included coats-of-arms, portraits, religious and classical subjects and, by the late eighteenth century, sporting scenes. The art reached its highest expression from about 1785 to 1835 with the work of the Edwards family - William, Thomas, and James - especially in the production of "double paintings," in which a different picture appears depending on which direction the pages are fanned. Fourteen examples are scattered throughout the exhibition, depicting a wide variety of sport, including foxhunting and hawking, golf, skating, polo, and the first Oxford-Cambridge crew race, at Henley-on-Thames in June 1829.

Original works on paper are among the most precious objects in the Library's collections. Included in the show are a selection of sketches by Sir Alfred Munnings and Paul Brown, watercolors by Henry Alken, George Fothergill, and John Absolon, and pen-and-ink hunting scenes by the lesser-known artists Thomas Smelt and Thomas John Phillips. Often bound into scrapbooks and by definition unique, these pictures comprise an irreplaceable part of the Library's holdings and are an important part of any presentation of sporting illustration.

Art Between Hard Covers will run from October 13, 2000 through March 30, 2001, with periodic changes in the individual illustrations on view. As diverse as they may be in style, medium and subject matter, all the images on display embody a shared passion for the sporting culture that the National Sporting Library seeks to document, celebrate and preserve.