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The title of this somewhat mysterious painting, which is the artist's own, seems deliberately to give little away. At the center of the composition a gamekeeper is shown loading a dead hare into a pannier on a mule. Behind him to the left another keeper walks up the hill holding a dead mallard, presumably just retrieved by the dog that follows him. Since they are identically dressed, there is a sense of sequential movement about these two figures, almost as if they represented the same man carrying out different parts of his job. The third man in the scene, seated in the left foreground with a retriever and spaniel at his feet, is less readily identified. He is dressed like the others, which might suggest that he too is a gamekeeper. Yet the fact of his resting while the others work implies that he is their master, an idea borne out by a contemporary description of the painting in the Sporting Magazine as "A Gentleman and his keepers loading a mule with the spoils of the day: a Snow Piece."[1]

Despite the observed, portrait-like character of the seated man and the keeper with the hare, it is unlikely that they are intended to be recognizable individuals. In a portrait it would be most unusual for a gentleman to be subordinated visually to a servant. Furthermore, the artist sold the work at auction a couple of years after it was painted, which strongly suggests that it was uncommissioned. He seems to have had something more general than portraiture in mind, and indeed something more ambitious than one would expect from a picture called The Day's Sport. Clearly this is no sociable shooting party of the kind painted so often and so fondly by sporting artists. In fact, with no more than one gentleman in attendance, and the second keeper carrying a gun, it seems probable that the day's outing has been less for sport than for provisions. The killing has been abundant, including not only the hare and duck, but various other birds that are laid out across the foreground: snipe, partridge, pheasant, and a swan. It is sunset in the autumn, the dying times of the day and year, and the light pall of snow is spotted with blood. The subject is redolent of death. Yet, thanks largely to Ward's robust and animated manner of painting, the general mood of the piece is far from deathly. There is the same sense of nature's bounty that comes across so powerfully in the landscapes of his great artistic hero, Rubens; the far distant view to the left, the bold inclusion of the sun, even the shooting theme, recall the famous Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen (National Gallery, London), then in the collection of Sir George Beaumont. Although the old tree in the middle ground has lost most of its leaves and shows a dead stump where a large branch has been cut, the branches that survive seem to writhe, almost van Gogh-like, with growth and energy.

The lighter-haired of the village children to the right looks on with a melancholy expression, as though feeling sympathy for the animals, lamenting the massacre of fellow innocents; the dark-haired child seems affected less, perhaps regarding the massacre more in the light of a feast in the making. It is only the keeper with the hare, going about his business with the solemnity of some ancient seasonal rite, whose features hint at some understanding of the day's sport in its larger significance-as a microcosm of life and death in the cycle of nature.

[1] Egerton 1978, 218.

Malcolm Warner

Malcolm Warner, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 126, no. 50, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)