A Repose after Shooting
George Stubbs·1770
Historical Context
A Repose after Shooting from 1770 by George Stubbs depicts hunters at rest after a day's field sport, combining genre painting with his animal expertise in a subject that celebrated the leisured sporting life of the Georgian landed class. The shooting party—gentlemen with their guns, their dogs, and perhaps a bag of game—represented a quintessential subject of English rural culture that Stubbs returned to several times throughout his career. Unlike his more formally structured equestrian portraits, such shooting scenes allow a more relaxed compositional arrangement, the figures at ease in a landscape rather than posed for inspection. The human subjects, the dogs, and the landscape are each treated with the careful precision Stubbs brought to all pictorial elements. The work is held at the Yale Center for British Art.
Technical Analysis
The resting figures, dogs, and game are rendered with Stubbs's characteristic precision, creating a harmonious composition of the sporting life at ease.
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