This particularly fine collection of early 19th-century animal subjects is by various hands, including William Gunton and B. Fenning. The works feature horses, hounds, deer and game birds, and tell of early 19th-century rural British sporting life. The focus of these pictures is very much the animals depicted—a focus enhanced by the contrasting use of graphite and watercolour in some of the works. But in the depiction of these animals, the human activities in the 19th-century that they were associated with are never far away. By association, these pictures are also about riding, hunting, shooting and coaching.

Sporting and animal art became increasingly popular in the 19th century. The English artist Ben Marshall (1768–1835) claimed ‘I have discovered many a man who thinks 10 guineas too much for painting his wife will pay 50 guineas for painting his horse’. But sporting art was also more than this, capturing more profoundly the relationship between man and the natural world, and engaging with developing scientific and popular interests in natural history and zoology.