Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was a lifelong Bostonian who studied briefly with the painter and sculptor William Rimmer (1816-1879), but was essentially a self-taught artist. His lasting love of the outdoors, hunting, and fishing led him to undertake naturalistic paintings and wood carvings primarily featuring birds and dogs. As a contemporary of William Michael Harnett, Pope belonged to a small group of late 19th century still life painters who were skilled in the art of trompe l'oeil, which he often incorporated into his still life paintings.

The portraits of the two setters are almost character studies, each with its own personality, as Howard J. Cave wrote in his 1901 article on Pope in Brush and Pencil (Howard J. Cave, "Alexander Pope, Painter of Animals," Brush and Pencil, vol. 8, May 1901). Dogs frequently feature in Pope’s compositions, a number of which were reproduced by chromolithography in Celebrated dogs of America: Imported and Native, published in 1879 in Boston by S.E. Cassino. The grass stains on the standing setter’s coat in the present painting suggest the pair was recently outside, and perhaps responsible in part for the successful hunt, proudly hanging at upper right.

Groups of birds–here two grouse and three woodcocks–recur throughout Pope’s oeuvre, recalling 18th-century still lifes by Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin but also modern treatments of the traditional subject by Claude Monet, including Pheasants, Woodcock, and Partridge, painted in 1879.