Bridle: My North Star

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Hounds

By Sean Cully, MFH

Rose Tree-Blue Mountain Bridle 2015 sports her winning ribbons for Overall High Scoring Foxhound and for leading the hunt to first place among the competing packs at Millbrook.  /   Maryann Cully photo

I want to tell you about a foxhound in my pack, the Rose Tree-Blue Mountain Hunt (PA). She has proven herself to me for years and just finished the Millbrook Performance Trial as the overall high-scoring foxhound.

Selecting hounds to take to Millbrook, I was not at all sure I would bring her. Now, in her seventh season and having whelped two litters of puppies, I had reservations.

Millbrook Hunt Hosts Season’s Performance Trial Opener

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Hounds

By Norman Fine

RoseTree-Blue Mountain prevails with all five entries finishing among the top-ten overall scoring hounds, including Bridle 2015, the winner.

Through an early morning mist, foxhounds are in full cry after the coyote. This excellent video was filmed on the second day of the Millboo Hunt Foxhound Performance Trials.  /   Video by Marion Latta de Vogel

The first of ten foxhound performance trials scheduled across North America this season is history. Millbrook Hunt (NY) hosted the 2021/2022 opener on September 8 and 9, 2021. Participants enjoyed superb weather, gorgeous country, exciting sport, and Millbrook’s unparalleled hospitality.

The first nine trials are qualifiers for the tenth and final Grand Championship Trials. That final showdown is scheduled for March 26 and 27, 2022, in Hoffman, North Carolina, where a national champion and the top ten foxhounds countrywide will be recognized.

A Sportsman’s Artist: Franklin Brooke Voss

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Art

By Claudia Pfeiffer

Franklin Brooke Voss (American, 1880–1953), Tom Allison, Huntsman of Meadow Brook Hounds, 1934, 12 x 16 1/8 inches, National Sporting Library & Museum, Gift of Katrina Hickox Becker, 2020

Franklin Brooke Voss counted among his patrons a Who’s Who of some of the most successful and affluent people in the United States in the early-to-mid-20th century, including the likes of John Hay Whitney, J. Watson Webb, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Alfred Vanderbilt, Walter Jeffords, F. Ambrose Clark, and Emily T. DuPont. These patrons, however, had something other than wealth in common. They were all equestrians in a golden age of turf and field sports, and just as importantly, they were supporters of the arts.

Toulouse-Lautrec: Horses, Hounds, and the Hunt

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Art

By Norman Fine

This astonishing photograph, sent by Debra Pring, shows Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec standing by horse and hound and holding a French stag hunting horn.

And here we thought that the Master Post-Impressionist spent all his spare time at the Moulin Rouge with wine, dancers, prostitutes, and his fellow artist friends. Not so! Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was well familiar with horses, hounds, and stag hunting.

The Blue Birdseye Stock Tie

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Strictly Fun

By Norman Fine

Blue Birdseye stock ties in the field at the Orange County Vixens’ Meet in 2020.  /   Joanne Maisano photo

Six or seven years ago, Foxhunting Life published a story about an attractive item of attire from foxhunting’s earliest days―the blue birdseye stock tie. Eye-catching and colorful, it can be seen in eighteenth-century foxhunting prints if you look closely.

Mostly unknown in North America, the blue birdseye stock tie had long been worn by a stylish and knowledgeable few in England and Ireland. We decided it deserved to be resurrected here as well. So, we located appropriate material and introduced it to North American foxhunters in our shop. It was a hit, and since then, at the start of every new season―strictly for fun―we publish an article of reminder. And the story.

Alfred Wheeler’s Duster

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Art

By Norman Fine

Duster by Alfred Wheeler, 1910, oil on board, 8 x 9-1/2 inches, framed 11-1/2 x 13 inches, $4,500.

Here’s a small, nicely-framed painting of a foxhound by a respected English artist born in the mid-nineteenth century. It is priced at $4,500 by an equally respected art gallery in New York. If I were starting my own collection of sporting art and still had wall space in my home (and my other bills were paid), I would buy it.

The painting is a head-and-neck portrait of an Old (traditionally-bred) English foxhound, clearly from the days when English hunt staff cropped the ears―happily no longer practiced. It’s not terribly creative. Rather formulaic when compared to another painting by the same artist―this other hound being one in a set of five small paintings of four hounds and a pair of hunters from the Duke of Beaufort’s establishment. The two are similar in anatomy, view, and shading technique but different in the ear and eye details.

Harry Worcester Smith...the Great Hound Match of 1905...a Discovery?

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Hunting Days of Yore

By Buck Wiseman

Photograph discovered by Baily's in a biscuit tin, dated 1905 on the back, and appearing American.

The historic and well-documented Great Hound Match of 1905 was a face-off between A. Henry Higginson’s Middlesex Hunt (MA) with its English Foxhounds and Harry Worcester Smith of the Grafton Hunt (MA) and his American foxhounds. The Match was held in the then hunting country of the Piedmont Fox Hounds (VA), with each pack alternating hunting days.

Despite the substantial coverage by the press and public interest in the Match at the time―and ever since―something has been missing.

Kennel Crisis Demands Quick Action

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Hounds

By Andy Bozdan and Delia Large

Camargo huntsman Andy Bozdan and a healthy Fargo.

With permission, here’s a recent FaceBook post by Andy Bozdan, the London-born huntsman at the Camargo Hunt (OH). The post generated excited congratulatory praise from foxhunters all over, and justly so. This is a man with a big heart for animals. Let’s just say, “a big heart...period.”

I contacted Andy, wanting to write about his experience in Foxhunting Life, and Andy agreed by saying, “If it could be helpful, then yes.” After adding that what he did was based on training he’d had for humans, Andy suggested, “I think it would be good to get a knowledgeable vet to give the actual procedural advice.” Right you are, Andy, so here’s both.