WOOTTON, John

This picture shows a lady’s bay hunter held by a liveried groom in a classical landscape, with a hound and a peacock looking on. It is likely that this is a portrait of a horse belonging to the painter’s friend George Rochfort, 1st Earl of Belvidere (1708-1774), who spent much of his life in London.

The picture shows a dark chestnut racehorse held by a jockey, by the Rubbing Down House, Newmarket Heath.

This painting depicts a black groom holding a lady’s side-saddled hunter. She stands holding her hat, gloves and riding crop with her spaniel and Italian Greyhound. There is a view of the Banqueting House beyond and in the distance is St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The present painting is an interesting and unusual composition by Wootton; it has been suggested that the scene may be an illustration of a literary or theatrical scene.

This painting depicts a race meeting on the celebrated Round Course at Newmarket, watched by the Duke of Wharton and Tregonwell Frampton, who was Keeper of the King’s running horses at Newmarket under three sovereigns. Newmarket was established by James I in 1606 as the earliest centre for racing in England, the first race taking place in 1622

Dog portraiture began in France at the court of Louis XV, who commissioned portraits of his favourite hounds hunting scenes of Frans Snyders. In England, where the emphasis in hunting was increasingly being placed upon the performance of individual hounds, which led to intense rivalry among the landed elite, this was reflected in the paintings of John Wootton and Peter Tillemans; the former of whom in particular started to produce portraits of dogs in the mid eighteenth century. Fine examples of Wootton’s work in this manner include the mock heroic portrait of Horace Walpole’s favourite dog Patapan, painted in 1743. However, it was Stubbs, a generation later, who really developed the genre, working, as he was, at a time when dogs were becoming increasingly valued not only as sporting trophies, but as objects of interest in themselves. By the late eighteenth century, the dog had gained a new status as a prized possession within English households which it had not formerly enjoyed. Stubbs’s highly sensitive paintings of these animals are executed with infinite attention to detail and are possessed with boundless character and charm. Whilst they are seldom uninteresting as paintings, at their best they are small masterpieces.

Frederick, Prince of Wales, is shown seated, wearing hunting livery with the ribbon and star of the Order of the Garter. Two loaders can be seen behind him at the right edge of the composition, while John Spencer (1708-46) stands on the left holding a partridge behind his back. He was the father of the 1st Earl Spencer and the favourite grandson of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, whom he succeeded as Ranger of Windsor Great Park in 1744. Horace Walpole remarked on Spencers early death in a letter of 20 June 1746 to Sir Horace Mann: Jack Spencer, old Marlborough’s grandson and heir, is just dead, at the age of six or seven and thirty, and in possession of near £30,000 a year, merely because he would not be abridged of those miserable blessings of an English subject, brandy, small-beer, and tobacco.’ The Duke of Queensberry (1698-1778) quarrelled with George II and therefore, given the nature of Hanoverian politics, found favour with the king’s son Frederick, Prince of Wales, becoming Gentleman of the Bedchamber (1733-51) and Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers (1758-78). Later he served George III as Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland. He was the patron of the dramatist John Gay.

Wootton was the foremost sporting artist, landscape and battle painter of early Georgian England. He was patronised not only by members of the Royal Family, but also by leading aristocratic families such as the Dukes of Beaufort, Devonshire, Newcastle and Bedford. Frederick, Prince of Wales, commissioned a number of hunting scenes from Wootton, and two battle scenes [The Siege of Lille and The Siege of Tournay] commemorating the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns during the War of the Spanish Succession (1689-1713); these were hung prominently in Leicester House. In addition, he acquired three important landscapes of the grounds of Park Place near Henley-on-Thames, an estate purchased by the Prince of Wales around 1738. Trained by the Dutch artist Jan Wyck, Wootton became an adroit painter of horses and dogs, but the landscapes in which he set his sporting scenes were influenced by Poussin, Gaspard Dughet and Claude. The style of Claude is apparent in The Shooting Party, especially in the treatment of the sky and the trees.

The frame for the painting was made by Paul Petit (active about 1740-45) two years after it was delivered by the artist. The frame is handsomely decorated with hunting trophies and equipment. At the top a lion’s head supports the Prince of Wales’s coronet and feathers, while below on the base rail a hawk stands astride a dead bird. A dead snipe and duck lie on the upper cornice, while hounds’ heads emerge from the scrolls at the comers.