.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The rather peculiar subject of this picture was described early this century by W. Baillie-Grohman in his Sport in Art: 'a decadent sport which was greatly enjoyed by the courtiers, and in fact by all classes [was the sport of] fox-tossing matches such as were then fashionable at most German courts. These entertainments were either held in woods in enclosures formed by canvas screens, or in the large courtyards of palaces where....Not only foxes were tossed, but also hares and badgers and sometimes wild cats....The tossing was done by two persons standing about twenty or twenty-five feet apart holding the ends of tossing slings made of webbing or cordwork...As the animals were running around leaping over the tossing slings, the centre of which lay slack on the ground, it behoved the tossers to jerk the animals into the air as forcibly as their strength permitted....
'At the Saxon court, which was then the most pleasure-loving in Germany, Elector Frederick Augustus....was the first to introduce this amusement. This monarch, while mentally one of the most vacillating of rulers, was physically one of the strongest men of any age...It was he...who introduced heavier animals, such as two-year-old wild boars and even wolves. At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boars and 3 wolves were turned into the enclosure "to the great delectation of the cavaliers, but to the terror of the noble ladies, among whose hoop-skirts the wild boars committed great havoc, to the endless mirth of the assembled company". That injuries on such occasions were not infrequent need hardly be mentioned, and more than one young tosser was marked for life by the claws of a wild cat or the tusks of a young boar. The former animals, as one writer remarks, "do not give a pleasing kind of sport, for if they cannot bury their claws and teeth in the faces or legs of the tossers, they cling to the tossing-slings for dear life, and it is next to impossible to give one of these animals a skilful toss".'
'At the Saxon court, which was then the most pleasure-loving in Germany, Elector Frederick Augustus....was the first to introduce this amusement. This monarch, while mentally one of the most vacillating of rulers, was physically one of the strongest men of any age...It was he...who introduced heavier animals, such as two-year-old wild boars and even wolves. At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boars and 3 wolves were turned into the enclosure "to the great delectation of the cavaliers, but to the terror of the noble ladies, among whose hoop-skirts the wild boars committed great havoc, to the endless mirth of the assembled company". That injuries on such occasions were not infrequent need hardly be mentioned, and more than one young tosser was marked for life by the claws of a wild cat or the tusks of a young boar. The former animals, as one writer remarks, "do not give a pleasing kind of sport, for if they cannot bury their claws and teeth in the faces or legs of the tossers, they cling to the tossing-slings for dear life, and it is next to impossible to give one of these animals a skilful toss".'