1750-1930 Creating the foxhunting interior

Great halls, libraries, art and furniture have been used to venerate venery, creating the perfect environment for reflecting on the day

- DR HANNAH CLARK

Fox hunting was not only performed in the field but ‘re-enacted’ over long winter evenings (often fortified by generous quantities of alcohol and storytelling) in the hunters’ lodges, clubs and interiors. A carefully chosen ‘sporting assemblage’ of sporting art, sportsmen’s libraries, taxidermy and hunting objects formed the stage on which the huntsmen chose to perform.

This ‘sporting assemblage’ was as much a tool in constructing identity as the physical act of hunting itself. From Henry Alken’s celebrated hunting prints in a sportsman’s library to Art Deco 1920s cocktail shakers, the imagery of the chase galloped across both practical and decorative objects. Yet, like all fashion, hunting interior trends were cyclical. Between the 1780s to the 1930s, the style, content and display of these spaces altered dramatically and went through four distinct phases, reflecting the changing status and geographies of the sport and those who hunted.

A ‘TOOZLING’ SQUIREARCHY

Before the advent of modern fox-hunting in the 1780s, 18th-century hunting interiors were largely considered unsophisticated relics of past aristocratic hunting glories. What remained was a world of ‘toozling’ in the hedgerows and squireish hunting, caricatured by Henry Fielding’s Squire Western from the novel Tom Jones. Fashionable hunting enjoyed by royalty and the nobility had been dealt a severe blow by the Civil War, where deer, deer parks and royal forests had been all but destroyed by Cromwell. Surviving aristocrats had also been lured away by new, fashionable entertainments in Britain’s growing urban centres. Thereafter, the countryside homes, hunting activities and interiors of any remaining rural gentry were considered old-fashioned.