Richard Ansdell, R.A.

Frost & Reed Ltd., London
Richard Green, London

Possibly, London, Royal Academy, 1885, no. 727

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting shows a fair amount of very accurate thin restoration in the lower sky in the gray colors, particularly around the dogs however, the condition is quite healthy. It is a complex painting with a good deal of sensitive glazing, most of which has survived very well. There are retouches in the trousers, in the stomachs of the two pheasants on his back and perhaps in the front leg of the dog. These retouches are faintly visible under ultraviolet light. The canvas has a glue lining and the paint layer will clean a little, although the picture could also be hung as is.
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While living the majority of his adult life in London, Ansdell also owned homes in Lancashire, Hampshire and Loch Laggan in Scotland.  The shifting landscapes of these regions (open pastures to rugged, rocky fields) and changeable weather (sunny skies to cold, grey clouds) were inspirational to the artist, as were the robust local country people. This helped inform his pair of works The Scotch Gamekeeper and The English Gamekeeper, both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855 (and both sold: Sotheby's, Gleneagles, August 31, 2005, lots 1035 and 1036) which celebrated men who lived on the land and from the hunt.  A variation of Shooting The Covers was perhaps first attempted by the artist in 1874 when his Outside the Cover, which similarly depicted a gamekeeper with his retrievers, was exhibited at the Royal Academy.  In each of these works Ansdell elevated the often-humble gamekeeper to iconic status by centering the picture space around him, his hounds and prey close at hand.  With Shooting The Covers the viewer is placed slightly below the picture plane, allowing the gamekeeper to loom large as he strides across a field of tangled brambles and saplings, his broad back carrying a brace of pheasants, sack heavy with smaller game birds, while his dutiful retriever carries a hare. Such game was prolific throughout England and Scotland; shooting, particularly partridge, pheasant and grouse, was a popular sport throughout the mid to late-nineteenth century, and took place on both maintained estates and wilder settings.  Setters and pointers were dispatched to find coveys, draw the birds out of their perches in the deeper woods to the ridge line, and then flush them from the ground so they could be shot as they ran or  flew into the air. Such sport added an extra month or six weeks to the sporting calendar and, as Ansdell's gamekeeper's heavy coat suggests, often took place in colder months (Anthony Vandervell, Game & the English Landscape: The Influence of the Chase on Sporting Art and Scenery, New York, 1980, p. 116). This gameskeeper is likely an "ordinary" sportsman, as suggested by his relatively modest costume and the hare; though rural gameskeepers and tenant farmers enjoyed hare hunting as sport, many of the upper classes considered it mere pest control (Vandervell, p. 84).