Sporting

The Fine art of the Hunt

Southerners need non travel far to get upward shut with some of the world's all-time sporting art

December 2017/January 2018

W h en you gaze at a high-quality piece of work of sporting art, it's the mood of the piece that grabs you. You can about hear the flutter of a quail's wings, smell the Georgia pines, experience the forenoon's dew on your fingertips.

The grade wasn't ever appreciated by fine art historians. For much of the last century, they viewed the genre every bit largely consisting of vanity pieces for elite families of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who commissioned artists to paint portraits of their racehorses, gundogs, fox hunts, and angling exploits. Only in recent years, as a diverseness of sporting fine art has passed through to the market in private deals and at auction, the best examples take become valued for what they are—"beautiful images of animals and of import reflections of culture and traditions," says Turner Reuter, owner of Middleburg, Virginia's Red Fox Fine Art. This reappraisal has allowed for such contemporary sporting artists every bit the watercolor and oil painters Eldridge Hardie (from Texas) and Brett Smith (from Louisiana) to be recognized more and more as truthful masters.

The S, with its legions of hunters and anglers and rich sporting tradition, has long been fertile ground for collectors of the genre. And then it'southward no surprise that the region is also home to some of the best sporting-art galleries in the world.

Collectors Covey
 Dallas, TX

Legendary sporting-fine art dealer Bubba Wood founded this celebrated Dallas gallery dorsum in 1978. Two years ago, information technology was purchased by Joe Crafton, who moved the gallery from Inwood Village to a converted depository financial institution building in Preston Heart. Collectors Covey specializes in Western and wildlife art, including the Rocky Mountain wild animals and landscape paintings of Dan Metz, the line-fishing and gundog oils of Roger Cruwys, and the bronze animal sculptures of Walter Matia. Crafton too sells Caesar Guerini guns—displayed in the erstwhile bank vaults. Since its inception, the gallery has been a major benefactor of sporting initiatives, donating millions of dollars to Texas wildlife conservation efforts. collectorscovey.com

Cross Gate Gallery
 Lexington, KY

As yous might expect from its Bluegrass Country home, Cross Gate focuses on equine-related art. The gallery's offerings range from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through today, from Samuel Alken, Jr.'southward foxhunting scenes to Peter Williams'south Thoroughbred pieces. The owner, Greg Ladd, who founded the gallery in 1974 later on graduating from the Academy of Kentucky, has exhibited some of the bigger contemporary names in the equestrian realm, and is the sole rep for the Polish-born, Kentucky-based painter Andre Pater, known for his mastery of light and movement. Fasig-Tipton, the Thoroughbred racehorse sale company, and the Breeder's Loving cup are two of the gallery's more than prominent clients. Since 2013, Ladd and the Keeneland Race Course have organized the annual Sporting Art Sale, where last year a Pater pastel portrait of a Lakota warrior sold for $276,000. crossgategallery.com

photo: COURTESY OF CROSS GATE GALLERY

Thora with Edward "Snapper" Garrison Up, past Henry Stull, sold by Cross Gate.

InSight Gallery
 Fredericksburg, TX

Possibly only in Texas would you detect a museum-level gallery infinite housed in a 12,000-square-foot former dry-appurtenances building. Elizabeth Harris started working at InSight in 2010, the year after its founding, and quickly became the gallery'southward director. "The best sporting art is evocative and connects to its viewers through the senses," she says. "I really loved working with information technology." And so much so that, ii years ago, she and her husband, Stephen, bought the gallery. According to Har ris, some of her almost popular pieces reverberate its location in the Texas Hill State. Amidst them: the landscape art of Robert Pummill and the Western art and sculpture of Bruce Greene. insightgallery.com

photo: MOLLY CULVER

Inside the expansive InSight Gallery.

Red Fox Fine Art
 Middleburg, VA

Gallery owner Turner Reuter literally wrote the volume on American sporting art. His 842-page tome, Animal & Sporting Artists in America, published in 2008, is considered the definitive work on the subject. Reuter began dealing in sporting art in 1968. 8 years later, his conquering of Middleburg's historic Red Fox Inn provided him with a infinite—and the proper noun—for his showroom. Though Reuter carries works by major English sporting artists, his main focus is on American paintings and sculpture from the 1850s to 1950s, from such artists as Thomas Hewes Hinckley, who specialized in game-fauna scenes, and the equestrian sculptor Herbert Haseltine. His gallery, along with others, has helped make Middleburg—known for its fox hunts and signal-to-indicate horse races—a sporting-art mecca. redfoxfineart.com

The Sportsman's Gallery & Paderewski Fine Fine art
 Charleston, SC, and Beaver Creek, CO

Michael Paderewski is an avid outdoorsman who worked as a fly-fishing guide during his college years. That avocation, he says, naturally led him to his vocation: He owns a sporting-fine art gallery that has locations in South Carolina and Colorado. "Now I have to become hunting and fishing for business reasons," he says, laughing. Paderewski has been in the sporting-fine art game for twenty-3 years, and he caters mostly to the field and stream enthusiast. He sells works to high-cease quail-hunting plantations in the South and exclusive salmon lodges in Canada, and has placed pieces in the National Museum of Wildlife Fine art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While he specializes in investment-class works of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century masters, including the sporting and landscape artist Ogden Pleissner and the waterfowl and seascape painter Frank Ben son, Paderewski also has a robust collection of such living greats equally John Swan, who is known for his depictions of Atlantic salmon line-fishing and scenes of life on the water in the Bahamas, where he spends part of each winter. sportsmansgallery.com

photo: MARGARET HOUSTON

Michael Paderewski hangs a painting by John Swan at his Sportsman'due south Gallery in Charleston.

Stephen O'Brien Fine Arts
 Hingham, MA

Stephen O'Brien dedicates his gallery to the work of American artists, including the hunting and fishing principal Aiden Lassell Ripley, the canis familiaris artists Edmund Osthaus and Percival Leonard Rosseau, and the big-game painter Carl Rungius. But O'Brien, based on the seabird-rich coast of Massachusetts, is best known as i of the finest antique shorebird and waterfowl decoy dealers in the country. In 2007, he sold ii decoys fabricated by the Massachusetts carver Elmer Crowell for the world-record price of $1.thirteen million apiece—part of a group of thirty-i decoys that sold for $7.v million. He also stocks the work of contemporary carvers such equally the McNair family of Virginia (Marker and his sons, Ian and Colin). Like the waterfowl depicted in his gallery, O'Brien flies southward each winter, holding an annual sales consequence in Charleston, South Carolina, each February through his auction arm, Copley Fine Fine art Auctions. americansportingart.com