ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the appeal of the metaphor of the chase in mid- to late eighteenth-century painting and art writing, and how its waxing, then waning, popularity resonated with both changing environmental realities and a mounting recognition of nonhuman animals as sentient beings. It starts with an analysis of two major butterfly chase paintings involving children – William Hogarth’s Portrait of the Mackinen Children (1747) and Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly (c. 1756) – then moves on to chart the uses and meanings of the image of artistic creation as a form of chase, and of the artist as a hunter or a hound, in an array of British writings on aesthetics which culminated with Hogarth’s provocative art treatise, The Analysis of Beauty (1753). By bringing texts and visual representations into a fruitful dialogue, it suggests that resorting to such tropes contributed to destabilising the human/animal divide in an era already marked by two major cultural forces – the agro-industrial revolution and the growing cult of sensibility – which would radically transform men and women’s experience of an ontologically expanding environment.
