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View the new exhibition on loan from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation in Houston, TX.

“This exhibition features a subject that is familiar to Stark Museum attendees—that of hunting, but from a different perspective.  We invite the community to our opening reception for a first look at European interpretations of hunting,” comments Sarah Boehme, Curator.  She continued, “We are very grateful to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation for generously sharing this extraordinary collection and organizing this loan exhibition so that the Stark Museum of Art could present these works of art to our audience.” 

The hunt has been a pervasive theme in western art and literature since the time of ancient Greece. The sport, often approaching the status of ritual, was generally heavily regulated and restricted to the nobility, with violators subject to strict penalties including, in some cases, death.  A Noble Pastime includes sixteenth- to nineteenth-century representations of various aspects of the chase, such as hunting expeditions, game pieces, and portraits of hunters as well as animals.  This exhibition seeks to illuminate various hunting methods, to underscore the role of the hunt as an exclusive pursuit in early-modern European culture, and to emphasize the use of hunting imagery as a conscious tool for fashioning one’s self-identity.