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To coincide with the development of a National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art, due to open in Newmarket in spring 2016, this British Art Network seminar was dedicated to the examination of what seems to have become a marginalised genre of British art. The day of short presentations and roundtable discussion was designed to provoke new interest in Sporting Art and highlight the rich research potential that this area of British Art can offer.

This talk briefly examines the interaction between auctioneers, galleries and collectors of sporting art and how the British Sporting Art Trust defined the genre when it was first founded.

While it is easy to see that ‘sporting’ and ‘animal’ art are not interchangeable terms it can be harder to draw a clear distinction between the two: a problem that has certainly concerned historians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This talk briefly considers some of the implications of this specialisation, examining contemporary definitions and artistic practice, and suggesting some of the advantages of a renewed look at this classic period of sporting art from the ‘animal’ perspective.

This talk challenges the veracity of traditional interpretations of early nineteenth-century depictions of fox-hunting in the sporting capital of Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. Rather than depicting a timeless and unchanging sport, it argues that artists such as Henry Alken were in fact recording a highly contemporary and modern activity encompassing new ideas of athleticism, fashionability and masculinity. 

Sporting art, at least in the twentieth century is often overlooked and marginalised, given the predominance of a modernist, avant garde discourse. Sporting artists such as Tom Carr, Lionel Edwards, Gilbert Holiday and Edward Munnings, do not fit the ways in which twentieth- century British art is currently conceptualised. Anne Massey briefly introduces the work of these leading British artists, and offer a new, more inclusive, paradigm for the history of British art. 

In a stately home branch gallery for many years, and then unfortunately placed underneath a leaking pipe, Richard Ansdell’s enormous painting The Chase was consigned to storage in terrible condition. Now conserved, this once-unloved work has become a key piece in a small but popular display at Manchester, A Highland Romance: Victorian Views of Scottishness. Hannah introduces the picture in its current context as a case study in displaying a vast and detailed depiction of a violent sport.

With the creation of a new sporting art gallery currently underway in Newmarket, Cicely Robinson briefly re-examines Landseer’s Otter Speared to explore how challenging sporting subjects might be made accessible (and acceptable) for display in the twenty-first century.

As well as interrogating the status of “fighting art” within histories of British art, this talk examines the ways in which boxing, wrestling and British art have frequently come together to produce representations of animated physicality, athleticism and strength. Such scenes depicting the boxing match or wrestling bout often referred to the world beyond the ring, connecting to ideas about masculinity, the representation of the ideal body, race, class and morality.