One of the best places in the bustling hubbub of London for a moment of quiet reflection is Room 34 of the National Gallery. Right in the middle of it hangs Whistlejacket, George Stubbs’ three-metre-tall portrait of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham’s chestnut stallion. George Stubbbs and Whistlejacket Whistlejacket…
At the end of a British winter it is hard to associate our dogs and horses with glamour, so the work of Georgea Blakey is like a ray of sunshine beaming on to the general bog of muddy dog and wet tweed. Perhaps this is because Blakey has spent much…
FROM the 1850s to the present day, four generations of the Earl family, over more than 150 years, have been painting what it is that makes us tick. Now the Kennel Club has put together the first exhibition to span the whole family, not just in artwork but including letters,…
Eschewing the sentimentality of earlier Victorian painters, Jospeh Crawhall created masterpieces of observation. Janet Menzies takes a look at this iconic sporting artist. SPORTING ARTIST: JOSEPH CRAWHALL The ambition of every creative agent is one day to find a genre-buster: the new novel that breaks out of the narrow confines…
Emma Cawston, a country bumpkin at heart, has journeyed from Africa to the UK countryside with her oil pencils and has a diverse portfolio of fantastic paintings of wildlife and the sport of shooting. Janet Menzies talks to her to find out her process. SPORTING ARTIST: EMMA CAWSTON It feels…
Henrietta Graham has gone painting. This requires a week aboard the Karen of Ladram in the North Atlantic, fishing mainly for cod and hake. It gave Graham a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘painting en plein air’. She says: “I realised immediately that I wouldn’t be able to set…
After a short time chatting with mixed media artist Mark Hearld, the rather uplifting realisation emerges that everyone is an artist – perhaps. Certainly everything is art when seen through Hearld’s eyes. It is his infectious wonder and delight at the living world around him that makes Hearld’s collages, prints…
RIGHT from the beginning, sporting art has been denigrated or, at best, dismissed as not worthy of consideration. When George Stubbs began work in the 18th century, equine and sporting subjects were considered fit only for inn signs because they weren’t religious or allegorical. His ground-breaking The Anatomy of The…
Equine portraitist Madeleine Bunbury, like a magnificent mounted Phileas Fogg, has declared her intention of going Around the World in Eighty Horses. When we spoke she was already in America and about to paint an iconic Western mustang as well as a racehorse and a hunter. “It would be a…
Sporting artist Chris Sharp brings his salmon to life using layers of glaze and colour – as well as an understanding of their environment, as he explains to Janet Menzies
