The Start of the Hunt by American 19th Century
This is The Start of the Hunt, an oil on canvas painted around 1800. For over a century, its maker was categorized as a nameless folk artist and his work drifted into obscurity.
The painting captures the poised instant before the chase: a whip is raised, a horn is ready, and the pack of hounds strains forward. The warm sunrise suggests the whole day belongs to them. The young boy on horseback shows how this ritual was handed down.
The real story is a quiet scandal of erasure. The artist was a skilled, self-taught American who never trained in Europe, yet his work was dismissed by institutions that equated quality with a European pedigree. His identity and biography were not recovered until the 1940s, when scholarship began correcting these old biases.
A painting that looks like a simple morning ride turns out to be a record of what American art history almost lost.
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It looks like a cheerful country hunt, ready to begin. The rider raises his whip. The hounds are restless. This exact scene was painted around 1800, by an American. He never studied in Europe. He taught himself. For a century, experts filed him under folk art and forgot him. His real name and story only surfaced in the 1940s. The scandal is not in the painting, but in what happened to the painter.