Images of the hunt in nineteenth century America and their sources in British and European art

This is a study of images of hunting for wild game in nineteenth-century American paintings, prints, and popular illustration. Art depicting wilderness hunting or field shooting for common game birds and animals is emphasized. Geographically the study is limited to the eastern United States. British and European examples have been cited as sources or comparisons.;Before about 1870 American artists depicted hunting as a pleasant pastime. Compositions were based upon the traditional format of the British sporting print. Artists like A. F. Tait, G. Catlin, and T. R. Davis created static and idyllic images which are mythic and extoll ideas of abundance of wildlife, noble conquest over animals, the union of man with nature in the act of killing, and regeneration through violence.;American artists depicted children as hunters and trappers but did not wholeheartedly embrace the themes of the hunter's return or the hunter's chance meeting with a maiden. A new subject here was the hunters' camps where urban men retreated from constraints of business and city life.;After the closing of the frontier and the birth of the conservation movement, American hunting art changed. The focus moved to stricken wildlife, and the hunter was often shown in the background. The dead-shot image, a buck slain with one bullet, reflected American sportsmen's new "code of true sportsmanship.";Winslow Homer's Right and Left and Fox Hunt are based on foreign prototypes. The double-shot theme was common in England and on the continent. The Fox Hunt complies with an internationally popular Darwin-influenced artistic formula. Homer's most original work was Hound and Hunter, which expresses "the savage state" of American wilderness and the brutality of hunting as described in American hunting literature.;The artists' record reveals the impulse in Victorian genteel culture to justify acts of violence and killing by myth, ritual, tradition, primitivism, and metaphor.