English Sporting Prints

Thames and Hudson, London, first edition, 1974. Laminated illustrated wrappers , large 4to, 32 cm,. 224 pp, ills. From the blurb: "The attraction of sporting prints is immediate and lasting, partly because of the stories they tell, and partly because they often record specific and memorable events in the sporting world. But the best of them, of which this book provides a rich selection, are so beautifully executed that they justify their popularity on aesthetic grounds. While most art lovers and specialists are aware of the enormously talented artists who turned their hands to sporting pictures and prints, many people who have enjoyed such prints for years may be surprised to find the names of such fine artists as George Stubbs, Thomas Rowlandson and George Morland intimately associated in this field. F. L. Wilder, who has been a specialist in sporting prints for more than fifty years, provides a detailed history of their flowering in the early nineteenth century and of the artists and printers who produced them, as well as a section on nineteenth century sporting writers, a section on the technical processes used in the production of these prints, and a special section on reprints, which will be of particular interest and value to collectors. The extensive descriptions of the individual plates vividly recreate for us that period during the first half of the nineteenth century when sportsmen were wildly eccentric, losing and gaining fortunes within a matter of minutes, indulging themselves in a riotous and colourful life which can never be repeated. This is also the world made familiar to us in Dickens's Pickwick Papers and Surtees's Handley Cross." Contents: Introduction; Two leading sportsmen: Thomas Assheton Smith and George Osbaldeston; Sporting writers; Processes. The Plates: Horses and Racing Plates 1-19; Steeplechasing Plates 20-31; Hunting Plates 32-62; Shooting Plates 63-71; Coursing Plate 72; Fishing Plates 73-75, 85; Boxing Plates 86-78; Fencing Plate 79; Archery Plate 80; Cricket Plates 81, 82; Billiards Plate 83; Ice Skating Plate 84; Coaching Plates 86-96; Reprints. Ownership inscription on front free endpaper, otherwise near Very Good. .