Tally Ho!
Located in Lexington the heart of central Kentucky’s horse country, Keeneland is an international leader in Thoroughbred racing and sales, and celebrated its 85th anniversary in 2021.
As the world’s largest Thoroughbred auction house, Keeneland sets the gold standard for the industry globally, having sold more champions and stakes winners that any other sales company. Through the years numerous champion Thoroughbreds have graced Keeneland, and its spring and fall meets have served as a springboard to many successes.
The Cross Gate Gallery in Lexington was founded by Gregg Ladd, who had an early interest in fine art and a love of Thoroughbred horses. Ladd recognised that Lexington’s stature in the Thoroughbred world made it an ideal location to sell sporting art. His timing in the 1970s and early ’80s, when there was tremendous growth in Kentucky’s horse industry, could not have been better, and it has become one of the world’s premier sporting-art galleries.
The Sporting Art Auction held annually is a collaboration between Keeneland and Cross Gate, and has matured over the years into one of the genre’s most anticipated events in America. Ladd travels throughout the U.S. and Europe to acquire works that will capture the interest of ardent collectors.
Sporting art can loosely be defined as art featuring countryside pursuits — hunting, racing, shooting, fishing, et al — and many breeds of hounds and dogs fit comfortably into this genre. Most sporting-art sales include hounds and dogs among the lots offered, and this year’s sale in Lexington was no exception.
Sporting art has always had a strong following and now is no exception, even though some field sports are banned in some countries. Works by the America artists Henry Koehler (born 1927) and Larry Dodd Wheeler (born 1942), Polish-American artist Andre Pater (born 1953) and British artist Charles Church (born 1970) featured among the sporting artists represented in Lexington.
Koehler studied at Yale University in New Haven, and while at Yale he became interested in fox hunting. Much of his work depicts fox hunting, polo, racing, steeplechasing and numerous other field-sports subjects. He has had solo exhibition of his work in both America and London. His list of patrons reads like a “Who’s Who” of the good and the great, and includes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Paul Mellon, President John F. Kennedy, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Elizabeth II. For the Duchess of Windsor he completed many works featuring her Pug, which are included in my book “The Pug Heritage and Art.” His captivating study of two working terriers looking through a window sold above estimate for $3,173.
Wheeler received his formal training at the Maryland Institute College of Fine Art and has served as a picture conservator for, among others, the Smithsonian Institute. His work hangs in the Supreme Court Building and the Federal Building in Washington. His atmospheric painting of a huntsman leading his pack of hound across a creek in a woodland landscape with the trees beginning to take on the fall hues sold at the top end of its estimate for $8,225.
Polish-American artist Pater began painting professionally nearly 50 years ago. He graduated from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in Poland and subsequently moved to the United States. One of his first subjects was the Arabian horse, and he became the most sought-after painter of the breed. This led to a love of Thoroughbreds, which in turn led to hunting dogs, cattle and wildlife. He is one of the most sought-after artists in America for sporting subjects. His picture of two young hounds in a kennel sold mid-estimate for $64,625.
Charles is one of the world’s most sought-after equestrian artist. His clients span some of the biggest racing dynasties in the world, and his work is now held in many important collections, including the Omani and British Royal families. In 2023 Queen Elizabeth unveiled a large-scale hunting portrait by Charles for The British Sporting Art Trust. His study of three hounds resting in a kennel also sold mid-estimate at $64,625.
One of the most popular and best loved of all the British artists for his portraits of purebred dogs and pictures of Fox Terriers at rabbit warrens is Arthur Wardle (1864-1949). Offered in Lexington was a work very much a departure from his usual subjects for the sheer volume of dead game — a young doe, a hare, a cock pheasant and two rabbits — in an old barn with a spaniel. It sold for $4,700, just below estimate.
Alfred Wheeler (1851-1932) was one of the most prolific sporting and dog painters working in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He painted almost entirely for private commissions, of which his most important was Persimmon, one of the most successful racehorse at the end of the 19th Century. Bred and owned by The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, he won five of his seven races, including the 1896 Derby, one of the first horse races ever filmed. Wheeler’s portrait head studies of Fox Terriers/Jack Russell Terriers are legion and always find a market. The one in Lexington sold mid-estimate at $4,583.
John Trickett (born 1953) is one of the U.K’s. most popular of all the published sporting artists. He started his professional life as a footballer, but found his true vocation in art when in his 20s. Trickett is known for his game-shooting pictures and studies of black Labradors. Many commercial artists have a subject that “puts food on the table,” and for Trickett it is black Labradors; he has often been referred to “as the man who paints Labradors.” He once said to me in an interview: “I wake up some mornings and think what have I got to do today … oh, yes, another $%&! black Labrador!” It was a study of two black Labradors sitting in some long grass beside a wood that was offered in Lexington, and it sold mid-estimate for $4,700.
The Sporting Art Sale also featured a number of bronzes, of which the most interesting for collectors of dog art was a bronze of an inquisitive hound looking at a turtle. It was sculpted by Henri-Alfred-Marie Jacquemart (1824-1896), a leading contributor to the French animalier school whose works were exhibited at the Salon from 1847 to 1879. It sold above expectation for $8,813.