The Day's Sport

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Artist: James Ward (British, 1769–1859)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 39 1/2 × 51 1/4 inches (100.3 × 130.2 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This complex painting partly belongs to the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish game pieces by Frans Snyders, Jan Weenix, and others, in which the "bag," the spoils of a day's shooting, stands for the bounty of nature. Much in the painting, particularly the handling of trees, reflects James Ward's love of Snyders and Rubens. But the wintry subject also appears to have offered Ward other possibilities and themes arising from his evangelical Anglicanism.

He was much more inclined to deplore the indiscriminate shooting of birds and animals in the English countryside than to relish it. The Day's Sport, with a mountainous array of dead game, including the inert, bloodied swan, forms a kind of Noah's Ark in reverse: a critique of the insensitivity, cruelty, and indifference of man the hunter, versus the sympathetic feelings of innocent children. The seasonal associations with Christmas also strengthen the moralizing flavor of the work.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.