Sporting Art in Eighteenth Century England. A Social and Political History.

English sporting art is sometimes said to be a wrongly maligned and undervalued genre. Within one notable sector of society, however, its populariy is considerable, and has been so for some time.- Indeed, for those who mantain an active iterest in rural sports, sporting pictures have been of enduring appeal for almost three centuries. This sector, certainly, has found some difficulty in hsring its enthusiasm with the majority. The book is not the first attempt to realte the form and content of sporting pictures to the development of the particula social activities they treat. Indeed, over the past hundred or so years most commentatiors seem to have assumed, almost atomatically, that images of the field and the racecourse are better approached via the history of sport than via the history of art. But the author’s intention is neither to treat sporting art primarily as a visual record of on aspect of eighteenth-centuy life, når o view it as in some way the product of certain social conditions. The author is concerned wih the contribution of the art itself to those conditions; Public conception of the role of rural sport in English society – and therefore to a great extent the role itself .