Fine and decorative sporting art can gather up your soul, bringing happiness to you or whoever else might come to own and cherish it. Life is life, and even in the theater of our greatest passion the difference between a laugh and a tear is as capricious as the...
In a market increasingly dominated by loose, painterly works that imply rather than show, Daniel Smith is an unreconstructed realist. “Let me show you some real cool sheep,” Daniel Smith says. He rifles through a stack of slides, pushes one of them across the light...
An unlikely life. He was an English banker who ran off to America at an early age. He nearly starved in Mexico, bunked in a California bordello. He passed himself as a cowboy, farmer, lumberjack, Yukondog-musher and gold miner. He drove an ambulance in the First War...
Candid Cameron Just the other day I was riding down the road – Mike drives and chauffeurs me about, as it should be – and then I saw it. Another dog on a leash being led along the highway by a hooman. I instantly let out a few loud barks — never mind Mike’s ear was...
“Many people have the basic ability to draw what they see. All children love to draw. It’s just that most lose interest in it for whatever reason. But I never did. I fell in love with art and the outdoors when I started fishing the stream by my house as a...
I could go on and on; the bill of laden is interminable . . . all the things that can displace or render to anguish a joyful day of hunting or fishing. But it’s quibbling over pocket money. Folks who’ve lived past yesterday will tell you life is...
“Dennis identifies with big, powerful animals; the bold and the dangerous,” Smith says. “But he shows you some nuance of them that you’ve never seen. It’s like he knows we have some preconceived notion of what a certain animal is, so he...
The day I found myself, the wood duck came full-speed. From upriver and darting among cypress and willows — spilling air from his wings. Things had not been going particularly well, one single and specific vehicle of distress difficult to identify. Perhaps it was...
William R. Leigh ranks with Russell and Remington as one of the great eyewitness artists of the Old West. But his finest works may be of wildlife and sporting subjects. William Robinson Leigh was nearly 40 years old when he traveled to the Southwest in 1906. Disgusted...
Man ponders by coincidence. Nature knows better. The difference can sometimes be unfathomable. Late December . . . The Maryland Shores. . . Snowfall. . . Mystic, mesmeric, beckoning. Almost eight decades along for this wayfaring, wildfowling warrior — and still, when...
