Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait

Gill's Art Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts (acquired directly from the artist)

Ackermann Galleries, Chicago

Mrs. George Arden, New York

Christie's, New York, 22 May 1991, lot 86 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Warder H. Cadbury and Henry F. Marsh, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait: Artist in the Adirondacks, Newark, Delaware, 1986, no. 83.42, p. 268

A self-taught artist, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait immigrated from England to New York in 1850 and quickly achieved artistic success in the flourishing city. Only two years later, Tait discovered the Adirondacks and eventually moved to Long Lake, where the animals and natural wilderness of the locale became his primary source of inspiration and he became widely known for his wildlife and hunting scenes that celebrated the pleasures of sporting.

After the death of his second wife Polly, however, Tait sold his Long Lake house in the Adirondacks in 1882 and instead began spending his summers on farms and with friends in the nearby Orange and Putnam counties. There, his subject matter began to shift from the adventurous Adirondack scenes he had first achieved acclaim for to more bucolic depictions of livestock and domesticated animals that echoed his newfound rural surroundings.

Steady serves as an early example of the artist’s transition in both lifestyle and aesthetic as he depicts a subject he frequently returned to throughout his career, game birds and hunting dogs. Executed in 1883, the present work exhibits a change in the nature of the relationship between dog and bird—they are no longer predator and prey, but merely coexistors in the same space. The dogs appear more curious than hungry, a vast difference from the coiled tension of his previous works. Painted at a transitional moment in Tait’s career, Steady marks the beginning of his shift to the pastoral idylls that would compose the last two decades of his career.