Under a clear blue sky, mounted riders, splendidly attired in their scarlet coats, prepare for a day’s hunting. Since the main hunting season starts in the autumn, it could be a crisp early November day, especially given the majestic bare trees. A woman, perhaps a maid at the Bell Inn, hands out the traditional glasses of port or whisky as the hunt gathers at their morning meet. The pack of hounds can scarcely contain their excitement and two bounce over to the woman as she hands out the glasses. In the distance, the rest of the hunting party can be seen assembling
Heywood Hardy was born into a family of artists, his father James Hardy being a well known landscapist. Eschewing London for Paris, he spent a number of years studying at the Beaux-Arts as well as in Antwerp. Returning to England in 1868, Hardy’s services as an artist were greatly in demand. He was frequently commissioned to paint portraits, sporting scenes and animal studies, and he did so with a unique fusion of the techniques of British School artists as well as increasingly impressionistic brushstrokes. The latter is hardly surprising given the initial training he had received in Paris at the pinnacle of the Impressionist movement. Writing in 1881, Shepherd comments that ‘it [British School of painting] is probably superior in individuality, variety of treatment, and purity of motive [than the Impressionists].’1 It was in landscape and genre painting that artists of the British School truly excelled, and where Hardy’s sensitive and naturalistic renditions of the outside world came into their own.
Hardy shared a studio in 1870 with the animal painter Briton Riviere (1840-1920) and specialised in romantic scenes set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and often clothing his figures in period dress. He painted The Cleveland Hounds Exercising by the Sea in 1891 for the Wharton family as well as another study of the hounds with Colonel and Mrs. Wharton at Shelton Castle in 1899. His other sporting patrons included Sir Frederick Millbank (1820-1890) and Colonel Wyndham Murray. Hardy also collaborated with Hon. John Collier on the portrait of Gerald Heywood Hardy, Master of the Meynell Hunt which was painted in 1913. Hardy was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1880, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1891 and became Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1885.
1 Shepherd, G. H., A Short History of the British School of Painting.
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