Equestrian Print - II

Whip raised and horse mid-leap, a red-coated rider clears a broken fence with the hounds streaming ahead after the fox. This is a hand-colored print after Carle Vernet, the French painter who in the early 1800s was the great chronicler of the horse and the hunt, drawn by him and engraved and sold in Paris by the printseller Bance. Vernet's hunting scenes were so loved that they were printed and reprinted for a century, and this framed copy, found in Le Mans, dates to the early 20th, its paper foxed and warm with age under a striped wood frame. Sylvie hangs it low in a paneled hall, one of those small hunting scenes you only really look at on your way past.