Object Description
This charming painting depicts a group of gentlemen gathered around a kitchen table and admiring an English Setter. The snowy rooftops, just visible from the kitchen window, combined with the lit fire and holly decorating the picture frames in the room, implies that this is a Christmas scene. It also appears that the gentlemen have just returned from a fox hunt, and are now warming themselves, drinking port and smoking long pipes by the fire.
Five men — three gathered behind the table and two standing in front — are identically dressed in long black riding boots, beige jodhpurs, waistcoats, neckties and long red jackets. Of the other two men, one is seated and wears a long, olive-green jacket, grey trousers and small black shoes, while the other stands, dressed in a white shirt, blue waistcoat, jodhpurs, and shoes. This man, like the central figure, stands with his hands on his hips. A green top hat, pair of brown gloves and a riding whip rest on a chair in the left-hand foreground.
The men all turn to look at the grey English setter dog, which stands in the centre left of the scene. The dog appears alert and fixed to the spot — a pose that setters adopt when out hunting. It focuses its attention on the man who stands on the left-hand side of the canvas, holding a pair of gloves in his right hand. It is possible this man has instructed the dog to stand still in this way, or that he is about to throw the gloves for it to retrieve.
This beautiful, rural cottage scene was painted by the American artist, John Alfred Mohlte. Little is known about the artist’s life, except that he was an exceptionally skilled painter, who produced a number of paintings on the theme of hunting, and the life of the rural gentry. The artist’s signature, in the lower right-hand corner, is cleverly slanted to imply that it has been painted onto the flagstones of the cottage floor, rather than onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas.