Shooting

Painted in 1769 and now at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 'Shooting' is one of Stubbs's multi-figure sporting scenes, depicting the gentlemanly pursuit of game shooting as a social ritual. Unlike foxhunting, which required horses and thus gave Stubbs his most natural subject matter, shooting was practiced on foot, and Stubbs uses the opportunity to show figures in a landscape, with dogs serving as the primary animal focus alongside the game birds. The late 1760s were a productive period for Stubbs's sporting subjects: his Turf Gallery exhibition of 1794 would later consolidate his reputation, but works like 'Shooting' established the visual vocabulary of British sporting painting that persisted well into the nineteenth century. The Brighton museum holds the work within a collection strong in English art, and the painting demonstrates Stubbs's versatility across the full range of Georgian field sports rather than exclusively equestrian subjects.

Oil on canvas. The horizontal format spreads the shooting party across a landscape, with the figures of sportsmen, beaters, and dogs arranged at varying depths to create spatial recession. Stubbs balances the warm tan and brown of the dogs against the green-grey landscape ground, using the sportsmen's red coats as periodic colour accents.