Jacques Laurent Agasse

Catalogue entry

T02350 TWO HUNTERS WITH A GROOM c.1805

Oil on canvas, 25 1/16 × 29 7/8 (63.6 × 75.9)
Presented by Mr Paul Mellon KBE through the British Sporting Art Trust 1979
Prov: ...; Oscar & Peter Johnson, from whom purchased by Paul Mellon 1968.
Exh: British Sporting Paintings, Fermoy Art Gallery, King's Lynn, 1979 (14).
Lit: Egerton, 1978, p.183, no.188, repr. pl.62.

A date c.1805 is suggested because the treatment both of horses and landscape is closely similar to that in the painting in the Mellon Collection entitled ‘A little bay stallion from Lord Heathfield's stud’, two versions of which are listed in the artist's MS. Record Book (coll. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva) as having been painted in February 1805 and March 1805. T02350 may be the picture listed on 3 January 1806 as “p” of two horses a bay hunter & a stallion Evergreen 3/4 size Hants’. The landscape, a view over rolling countryside to distant blue hills, might well be Hampshire. The two horses are a bay and a chestnut, but the angle at which the chestnut is painted does not reveal its sex, and Agasse usually noted the inclusion of any figure as prominent as the groom is in this picture.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1978-80: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1981

Read more