Cockney Sportsmen Finding a Hare
This is the final plate of a series, Cockney Sportsmen, etched by Gillray and devoted to satirizing the hunting skills of its two cockney protagonists. The series consists of four plates and includes:
- Cockney Sportsmen Marking Game
- Cockney-Sportsmen Shooting Flying
- Cockney-Sportsmen Re-Charging
- Cockney-Sportsmen Finding a Hare
For more information about the series in general and its place in Gillray's work, see my commentary on the first plate, Marking Game.
© Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
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In the final plate of the series, the cockney sportsmen have gotten closer to a legitimate game animal than in any of the previous plates. But if they have "found" a hare, it appears to have been accidentally. Their dogs have not flushed him out and chased him down. And if they had, our cockney duo have no horses to take up the chase. Indeed the two dogs seem, if anything, to be hanging back, wary of the prey. They are being led by the younger cockney whose arm and body and gun all lean forward toward the huddled hare. It appears that his aim is to either flush the hare out into the open or anomalously to trap the hare with his top hat. But if he was familiar with the speed and agility of hares, he would know how unlikely either of those possibilities was.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on Cockney Sportsmen Finding a Hare.
- "Cockney," Wikipedia
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #495
- Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 272
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