A pointer by a game still life with a gun, pheasant, mallard, partridge, snipe and woodcock in a woodland clearing

WILLIAM MURRAY
Scottish School
18th century

A pointer by a game still life with a gun, pheasant, mallard, partridge, snipe and woodcock in a woodland clearing

Oil on canvas, signed, inscribed pinxit and dated 1794

67.3 x 111.7 cms

261/2 x 44 inches

Overall framed size 79.8 x 124.5 cms

                                 317/8 x 49 ins

William Murray was a Scottish artist about whose life little is known and whose paintings appear rarely. He worked in the latter part of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth and is known through his paintings which are comprised principally of paintings featuring dogs, either in a sporting still life composition featuring a gun and dead game usually in a woodland setting or else as studies of dogs more in the animal portrait mould.

The still life paintings tend to be a similar horizontal size and shape are reminiscent of earlier 18th century artists such as Charles Collins (c.1680-1744), Pieter Andreas Rysbrack (c.1684-1748) and Edward Langton (fl.1737-1751). The recorded dog portraits have been on a small scale and are best known from a group of paintings which passed through Ackermann and featured hounds including one of the Beagles Gudger, Betsey and Tuner.


Bibliography:
Dictionary of British Animal Painters - J C Wood
Dog Painting; A Social History of the Dog in Art - William Secord
Dictionary of British Sporting Painters - Sydney M Pavière
Dictionary of Scottish Art - Peter J M McEwan
Dictionary of Sporting Artists 1650-1900 - Mary Ann Wingfield