Two Gentlemen Shooting

George Stubbs, 1724–1806

ca. 1769

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

Two men in period clothing aim hunting rifles in a rural landscape, with dogs and a distant village under a cloudy sky. One man is firing, creating a puff of smoke. The third, climactic episode captures the moment when a shot—possibly the first of the day—is fired, leaving a ghostly cloud of smoke in the air. On the far right of the canvas the dead partridge falls upside down from the sky, as the hounds hasten to meet it. The light of the afternoon is beginning to dim, and dark clouds are making their way across the sky. The verses that accompanied William Woollett’s engraving after Stubbs suggest that it was the change of weather in the afternoon that brought the quarry into relief against the sky for the huntsmen, making possible a clear shot: “A Gentle Gale that blows along the land / The Ga