THERE hangs in the drawing-room of Skelton Castle, in Cleveland, a picture of Heywood Hardy’s, which illustrates to the full that artist’s wonderful power in combining the life and colour of a sporting subject with the poetry of English scenery. We are accustomed to many varieties of hunting pictures, but how few are worthy of the painter’s art. There is a dreadful family likeness amongst them--so many pink-faced sportsmen in tall hats and vermilion coats, so many white pairs of breeches, and so many tri-colour hounds. Sometimes we have these objects arranged standing at a meet, as if to be photographed. As we gaze, we are sad to think that they will continue to stand till time rots the canvas, and how long time will be about it; that those wooden hounds will never be thrown into cover; that the pink-faced huntsman in the scarlet coat will never get the horn, which he clutches in his dog-skinned hand, to his mouth; and that all those straight-limbed, clean-legged horses will never dash a speck of mud on to those spotless boots and awfully white breeches! But a more ambitious artist, wrestling with his difficult but popular subject, will make his red-coats leap over insignificant or impossible fences; he will have his hounds flying out of the picture to meet you as they dash over a rail or thread a fence; and will create not only a remarkable study in foreshortening of hounds, but one that fills the onlooker with amazement at the courage of the artist who, in order to make his study, must have placed himself and his canvas betwixt fox and hound, and braved the rush and charge of the yelling pack. The fox is often introduced upon the scene, that fox we so frequently hear about, “dead beat, with his tongue hanging out,” but so beautifully clean that one wonders where is that mudless country in which, instead of dashing at a draggled fox with his back up, the hounds follow this galloping and cleanly animal, with his mouth wide open and, of course, his tongue hanging; out. How different is the artist’s treatment of his subject in the picture at Skelton Castle. There is no fox, there is not a fence, there is not a covert, there is not even a picturesque top-hat or top-boot. The picture is called “A Summer’s Day in Cleveland,” and the scene is on the beach,--hounds swimming, splashing, and dashing out of a tidal pool on a sunny morning, accompanied by the old squire on a pony, the young squire (master and huntsman), and two servants in pink exercising coats, the picture combining the beautiful animation of the hounds with a wonderful harmony of colour and poetry of scene. Behind, the sparkling splash and spray, in the foreground are the breakers, whose white foam fades into the deeper grey of the North Sea and then into the pale blue of a summer sky, while beyond loom the rugged rocks of Huntcliffe Nab. As an admirer of the study, I can look long at this wonderful example of catching and fixing for ever the