Bachelor’s Hall; Capping on Hounds
1835 - 1836
Francis Calcraft Turner throws us right into the middle of a 19th-century fox hunt with this energetic scene. A pack of hounds tears across the foreground, scrambling over dirt and brush with noses to the ground, while gentlemen in red hunting coats follow on horseback. The man in the foreground on the brown horse raises his hat high, perhaps saluting the pack or acknowledging the 'capping' tradition—where non-subscribers paid a fee (a 'cap') to join the hunt for the day. It’s a great look at the chaotic, muddy reality of aristocratic sporting life in the 1830s.
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