LONDON.- Oil paintings by three titans of British sporting art come for sale at Chiswick Auctions on May 1. Significant works by Alfred Munnings (1878-1959), Thomas Blinks (1860-1912) and Heywood Hardy (1842-1933) lead the west London sale of Old Masters and 19th Century Art. They come for sale from a private UK collection.

The Norwich Staghounds' Point-to-Point by Munnings is guided at £70,000 - £100,000. Dated 1902 it was painted relatively early in his career as he worked to create his own brand of British Impressionism. Four years earlier he had lost the sight in his right eye in an accident but, determined to make his career as a painter, was already showing his pictures at the Royal Academy while attending classes at the Atelier Julian in Paris (1902-03).

Most of his pictures from the first decade of the 20th century depict life in East Anglia, usually incorporating horses. Munnings regularly rode out with the Staghounds that, he believed, represented a key part of rural life, one that was threatened by modern world. Its members, he later wrote in his memoir An Artist's Life, (1950,), comprised 'a cavalcade of farmers, a doctor or two, a squire or two, a butcher, perhaps, a veterinary, and some hard riding ladies'. As Munnings enjoyed an unofficial status as artist to the hunt he was allowed to dress-down, riding out with 'a black velvet cap on my head, a dark grey melton coat, white cord breeches and boots with brown tops'.

Another artist with a great passion and talent for equine portraiture is Thomas Blinks. Again painted in the first decade of the 20th century, Away! Away! is a particularly fine example of his work.

The scene, a smaller version of a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902, depicts a flock of white geese dispersing as the hunt comes through open countryside. Blinks received no formal training - he was sent to work as an apprentice for a tailor by his parents - but had a deep understanding of horses and hounds. Spending his time learning horse anatomy at the Tattersalls auction market, he became a master painter of sporting subjects and enjoyed both royal and aristocratic patronage. This present work is estimated at £40,000 - £60,000.

The third in this trio of Edwardian sporting pictures in a textbook painting by Sussex artist Heywood Hardy (1842-1933). Born in Sussex, he came from a family of artists: his father, his two older brothers, his sister and two of his cousins were all painters.
The Meet, depicting a hunting party regrouping at a crossroads, was among his favourite scenes. It is expected to sell for £8,000 - £12,000.

The sale includes a good selection of European Old Master paintings. These are led by Campagna Romana, an Italianate landscape populated with foreground figures by Andrea Locatelli (1665-1741). The Rome painter studied under several well-known marine painters but broke with tradition, and the popular subject matter of the period, by choosing to focus on these rural landscapes.

In their book titled ‘Andrea Locatelli and Roman Landscape Paintings of the Eighteenth Century’, Andrea Busiri Vici, wrote that "Locatelli’s landscapes are remarkable for the sense of solitude. There is a sense of seclusion, a quality that induced one to turn from the colourless life of the community to the joy of the isolation of an interiorized existence". The example offered here with a guide of £15,000 - £25,000 certainly captures this atmospheric seclusion.