Tally-ho cards present false image
The time-honoured images appear without fail at this time of year: stately hunts, people with horses and hounds setting off for a day’s sport from happy, snow-covered villages, laughing hunters and smiling sightseers waving at them.
Pomp and pageantry on parade.
Or dramatic, soul-stirring scenes of a hunt in full flight across a winter wonderland, with their blood red jackets, snow white riding breeches, dainty stirrup cups, and the golden majesty of the hunting horn.
The majority of these depictions of hunting are reproductions of works by well-known or classical painters, giving the impression that the artists concerned approved of animal-baiting. In fact, most of them simply painted what they saw, with no notion of endorsing or glamorising cruelty.
For decades hunters have manipulated and misrepresented the visual art depiction of their sport.
For example, they eulogise the work of George Stubbs. They point to his paintings that evoke the scenic beauty and the tradition of hunting.
Stubbs certainly highlighted that aspect, but you will never see a reproduction of his greatest painting, The Grosvenor Hunt, on a Christmas card: it is a haunting tribute to an animal that is torn to pieces for fun.
It writhes in blood and anguish as hunt followers look on without a trace of emotion.
The hunters likewise go into raptures about the work of Edwin Landseer.
Yet one of his finest paintings has an exhausted and terrified stag on a loch island. This work evokes our sympathy for the plight of a persecuted wild creature. These images that expose the dark side of foxhunting have been virtually suppressed by the picture postcard industry.
The hunt propagandists have had their day. It’s time the true feelings and bona fide artistic vision of the great painters were allowed to manifest on Christmas cards.
For too long these tokens of ‘peace and goodwill’ have fostered the big lie that hunting is something to smile about.
John Fitzgerald
Lower Coyne Street
Callan
Co Kilkenny
