The Hunters leave Southill

The departure, not the chase

The title fixes the moment: the hunters are leaving Southill, so this is the assembly and setting-off rather than the run. Sporting painters treated the departure as a subject in its own right, and it is the part of a hunting day in which the horses are visible as individuals, walking, standing and being held, before the field strings out and everything becomes movement. The animal's function here is about to be transport across country; in the picture it is still waiting.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1768 as the date of creation and a private collection as the location. The dimensions are 61 x 105 cm, a wide format well suited to a line of riders leaving a house. Romanticism is the style term recorded and British the nationality attached to the painter. Landscape and rural categories accompany Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Southill is a place, and the record stops there

The title names a house. The catalogue does not record who commissioned the picture, who is depicted, or whose animals these are, and this entry does not supply any of it. For sporting pictures in private hands that kind of information often exists only in a specialist literature this register does not draw on.