Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper, with a dying doe and hound

Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe and Hound from around 1800 by George Stubbs is among his last paintings, produced in his mid-seventies when his career was nearly complete. The aged gamekeeper, the dying doe, and the attending hound create an unusually elegiac composition for Stubbs, whose work typically celebrated the vitality and vigor of the hunting field. The dying animal and the old keeper suggest a meditation on mortality and the end of things—the sporting life winding down, an era concluding—quite different from the confident energy of his racing and hunting paintings. Stubbs's late oil technique maintains its anatomical precision while achieving a softer atmospheric quality. The work is held at the Yale Center for British Art and has been interpreted as one of the few genuinely melancholic images in an otherwise joyous body of sporting art.

The late painting maintains Stubbs's characteristic precision while achieving a more atmospheric quality than his earlier, crisper works. The dying doe and the gamekeeper's weary posture create a contemplative mood unusual in sporting art.