Oil painting, 'An 18th Century Hunting Scene', Henri Auguste d'Ainecy, Comte de Montpezat, 2nd quarter of the 19th century

Hunting scene with figures dressed in red and blue doublets, wearing long curly white wigs set in a woodland and accompanied by a pack of greyhounds.

Bought as one of a series of 'schools examples', which were circulated to schools for use in art classes, from H. Selwyn in 1886.

Historical significance: This painting is a good example of Ainecy's output. He produced mainly hunting scenes inspired by 17th-century Dutch artists such as Philips Wouvermans (1619-1668) who produced many small cabinet pictures depicting battle scenes, hunting scenes, army camps, smithies and stables.
The present scene depicts figures wear 18th-century costumes with white wigs and three-horned hats, commonly called English 'country' clothes, worn at the French court by the 1760s.
Comparable works include Hunt gathering, Musée du Louvre, Paris and Hunt gathering at the Croix de Noaille in the forest of St-Germain-en-Laye, Musée de la Vénerie, Senlis.

19th-century French art is marked by a succession of movements based on a more or less close relationship with nature. At the beginning of the century, Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. This movement was heralded in France by such painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). In its opposition to academic art and its demand for a modern style Realism continued the aims of the Romantics. They assumed that reality could be perceived without distortion or idealization, and sought after a mean to combine the perception of the individual with objectivity. This reaction in French painting against the Grand Manner is well represented by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) who wrote a 'Manifesto of Realism', entitled Le Réalisme published in Paris in 1855. These ideas were challenged by the group of the Barbizon painters, who formed a recognizable school from the early 1830s to the 1870s and developed a free, broad and rough technique. They were mainly concerned by landscape painting and the rendering of light. The works of Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1807-1876), Jules Dupré (1811-1889), Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), Constant Troyon (1810-1865) and Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) anticipate somehow the plein-air landscapes of the Impressionists.

Henri d'Ainecy, Comte de Montpezat (1817-1859) was born in Paris where he studied under Jean-Auguste Dubouloz (1800-1870). He was mainly a painter of portraits, hunting scenes and animals.

Although most of Ainecy's hunting scenes sjhow figures in contemporary outfits, this painting is characteristic of his oeuvre with thin elongated trees framing a large open field. The figures wear 18th-century costumes with white wigs and three-horned hats, commonly called English 'country' clothes, worn at the French court by the 1760s. This type of scenes was inspired by 17th-century Dutch imagery, which aroused a revived interest in the first half of the 19th century.

S.EX.191-1886