Pheasant and Hunter

Charles B. Newhouse · 1825-1877

Medium

Watercolor and gouache heightened with gum varnish on blue wove paper, tipped onto gray laid paper Remarks: NG "Worth taking out"=LS

Original size

12.9 × 17.8 cm (5 1/8 × 7 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Spare and precise, this small watercolor captures the quiet tension of a hunt — a pheasant mid-flush, a figure poised in the landscape — with the economy of line that defines the best British sporting art of the nineteenth century. Charles B. Newhouse built his reputation on coaching and country subjects, producing work that documented the field sports culture of Victorian England with an insider's eye rather than a romantic's. Here he works in watercolor and gouache heightened with gum varnish, a technique that lends the feathers a subtle sheen and gives the blue wove paper an atmospheric role in the composition rather than treating it as mere ground. The layering of opaque and transparent passages creates a sense of light and distance that purely academic watercolorists rarely achieved. The work is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the few Newhouse pieces in a major North American public institution, which speaks to its quality among his output. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates these qualities faithfully — the tonal restraint, the crispness of the bird in flight, the cool ambient light — rendered in oils on canvas so the work lives on a wall as it was always meant to be seen.