Sportsmen Shooting in an Upland Landscape

Schwanfelder was born in Leeds, the son of a German painter who had settled in Leeds and become a house decorator and painter of clock faces and snuff boxes. Schwanfelder trained with his father but soon made a reputation for himself painting horses. Most of his life was spent in Yorkshire but he is known to have painted in Wales, the Lake District and Scotland, these upland areas are the likely setting for this work. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1809 and 1818. His work was noticed by the Prince Regent and in 1814 a portrait of an Arabian horse belonging to the Prince was exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1816, two years before the present work was painted, he was appointed animal painter to the Prince, and in 1821 was reappointed to George IV. Sally Mitchell comments, 'He was a competent landscape painter and his subject matter is frequently set in slightly romanticised wooded landscapes. He was a good painter of dogs as well as horses and produced very appealing pictures of both, quite often working on panels.' Shaw Sparrow refers to him as a transitional artist, combining the classicism of Stubbs with the romanticism of Herring.

This was evidently a successful composition as Schwanfelder undertook a second version of the present work in 1832 with the same dimensions, showing slight variations in the trees and landscape.