AFA Summer 2019

Summer 76 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com WORKING LIKE A DOG The superb sporting art collection of John L. Wehle, founder of the Genesee Country Village and Museum in Mumford, New York, forms the core of an exhibition at the Pebble Hill Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia. The loan exhibition incorporates important pieces from Pebble Hill’s permanent collection and historical archives that explore the unique partnership between humans and canines over time. It is the second exhibition and collaboration between these two museums that house the best collections of sporting paintings of their kind. by Patricia Tice In 1672, English artist Francis Barlow painted this canvas, perhaps a commissioned portrait of an aristocrat’s favorite hunting dogs, and definitely a compelling work, both artistically and historically. The artist shows us the interior of a game larder, enlivened with a diagonal swath of golden light streaming from left to right, dividing the composition in half. At center, united by color and light, hangs a hare, nuzzled by the very greyhound that brought it to is current state. At upper right hangs a mallard duck and a bustard, a large land bird so popular in England in the seventeenth century that it was almost hunted to extinction. Punctuating this composition with a splash of scarlet is a live squawking cockerel not best pleased with his situation. On the table lie woodcock and pigeons, probably retrieved by the spaniels whose softly rendered forms form one side of the work’s triangular composition. Barlow was well acquainted with Dutch still life and incorporated the classical stone table and wheat stalks that were stock motifs of that genre. There is a Baroque sense of balance to this work that portrays birds that inhabit the earth (bustard and cockerel), birds that inhabit the water (mallard and woodcock), and those that inhabit the air (pigeons). Barlow painted this work one year after the Game Act of