Sporting prints making come-back

Press, 23 February 1977, Page 21

Sporting prints making come-back

By

ALEX FORREST

Sporting prints are a constant source of nostalgia, a reminder of epic and heroic feats, forays in eccentricity, outmoded practices, and disastrous upsets. We laugh at their romantic entanglements and absurdities, and glory in their excitements.

Over a period of about 150 years artists in Britain, several of foreign extraction, produced a series of paintings of sporting scenes that seem almost immortal today. These range from studies of. steeplechases, great sires of the Turf, classic flat races, foxhunts, coaching runs, and horse and carriage traffic in cities, to boxing, cricket, and real tennis — the game of monastic origin played by kings and aristocrats centuries before lawn tennis arrived. From such paintings, engravings were made and prints issued in limited “runs”. The earliest of all sporting paintings are attributed to Francis Barlow (1626-1702), whose work appeared in “Several Ways of Hunting, Hawking and Fishing in the English Way”, published in 1671, and in Richard Bloom's “Gentlemen’s Recreation”, issued in 1686.

Barlow's... most famous

painting, though, is “The Last Horse Race Run before Charles II at Dorsett Ferry, 1684”. Dorsett is a misspelling, modern experts hold, for Datchet in Berkshire. Since those roisterous days, this father of English sporting pictures has been followed by a great line of likeminded artists. Among the best known were John Wootton (16861765), George Stubbs (1724-1806), Ben Marshall (1767-1835), John Ferneley ( 1 7 8 2-1860), Abraham Cooper (1787-1868), and the Aiken family, sprung from Danish stock, whose artist sons lived from 1717 to 1894. Competent, bold, and spirited as is the work of these artists, in a popular sense it owes much to the skill of those who engraved the paintings, in some instances the artists themselves. The engravings, too, would be of limited appeal unless backed by energetic and inventive print dealers.

In this field, the London firm of Ackermann in Bond Street has a record of unparalleled service stretching back to 1783. In that year its founder, Rudolf Ackermann, who was horn at Stolberg, in Saxony, opened ius print

shop in the Strand on a site now occupied by the Savoy Hotel. Old prints reveal the shop as a handsome edifice in the best Georgian tradition. Ackermann, a man of scientific as well as artistic ability, lit his shop with coal gas — the first commercial establishment so equipped in Britain, if not in the world — using a private gas-producing plant largely of his own workmanship. Crowds flocked to the scene, but kept their distance, ex-

pecting to see the building blown sky high. He had his gallery on the main floor, a library upstairs where he entertained influential clients, and above this workrooms where artists coloured the aquatints he w'as introducing to the world. Among those who started their careers there were Thomas Rowlandson, Thomas Girtin, Turner, Henry Aiken, and James Pollard. At the same time, while fostering talent and conducting a successful business, Ackermann did much to develop and popularise processes of engraving

such as mezzotint, stipple, aquatint, and later lithography. As a further example of his versatility, he designed Nelson's funeral coach, and raised $lOO,OOO for the relief of stricken people in lands devastated by Napoleon, to which the British Government added a similar sum. Ackermann died in 1834. Since then the firm has had various moves, but few reverses, though it was bombed out in the Second World War. It now occupies elegant premises

at No. 3, Old Bond Street. Its present managing director, A. L. Gates, assembled between 2000 and 3000 sporting prints to form the largest collection of its kind in the world, now part of the Paul Mellon Foundation. “It took me 10 years to gather together that number, representing British pastimes and the work of the country's finest en "ravers,” says Mr Gates. Though several books have been written on the subject, the one unchallenged authority to date is Captain Frank Siltzers’ “The Storv of British Sporting Prints”, first

published in 1925 and revised in 1929. It is a mine of deeply researched information about the productions of sporting artists, stories of their inspiration, details of the prints, dates, characteristics, and a record of their engravers. Many families now delight in prints of oldfashioned foxhunts across open country, hounds in full cry, and riders beautifully' attired in hunting pink, in the tumbles of overwieight or overconfident horsemen at awkward fences or tricky water jumps. Almost as popular is the print of some whiskered, beaverhatted squire blazing away at a cock pheasant with his old muzzle loader. Exciting wagers once stimulated the popular demand for novelty and inspired artists and printmakers alike. A riproaring print. “The great carriage match against time,” represents a wager for 1000 guineas made by Lord March, afterwards the

Duke of Queensberry, and Lord Egiintin, against Theodore Taafe and Andrew Sproule. The two noblemen wagered that four horses could draw a carriage

with four running wheels and a man inside 19 miles in an hour. A lightweight

carriage was built, a course laid out on Newmarket Heath, the horses carefully trained, and the leader ridden by the Duke of Queensberry’s head groom. A huge crowd flocked to the heath on August 29, 1750, and there was immense excitement as the carriage drawn by its sweating horses rumbled home in 53min 27sec. Some credit for this feat was no doubt due to the oilcans fixed above the wheels, so that oil dropped on to the axles and prevented a disastrous seizure. There is bravura, too. inseparable from prints of ancient prizefighters, barefisted and ready to hammer each other to a pulp. Prints that almost make one wince to look at depict such epics as the prizefight between Tom Cribb and Molineux the Black, in which Cribb was tne victor after 44 rounds. There are mezzotints of savage fights between lions and tigers, also of Stubbs's great painting of a lion mauling a horse, pictures such as the mail in deep snow or the Dover Mail changing horses, all reminiscent of a bustling, colourful world of hazardous travel, much of which vanished with the arrival of the railways,