Two Gentleman with Pointers on a Grouse Moor

The 1908 catalogue entry for this important early work identified one of the two gentlemen as 'John Barker of Leighton Hall, Yorkshire'. While Herring did work in that part of the country at the time (see, for example, The Countess of Darlington's Carriage Ponies, signed and dated 1823, exhibited at Washington, National Gallery of Art, The Treasure Houses of Britain, 1985-6, no. 438), there is no surviving record of a Leighton Hall in Yorkshire. A picture given to Ramsay Richard Reinagle, and which is based closely on the present work, was with Ackermann's in 1967 with the sitters not identified; while an inscription below a photograph of what is presumably the Ackermann picture in The Witt Library (with a handwritten attribution to Herring) suggests one of the sitters is John Batsby.