Henry Poore

American painter and lithographer Henry Poore was a prolific illustrator, critic, and author on art and composition, including the standard work Composition in Art. He mainly produced rural landscape subjects, fox hunting, portraits, and animals. He has been described as a “spirited and versatile artist, able to paint on diverse themes and noted for his sporting pictures as well as genre and landscape paintings.”

Poore was captivated by the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1874, and started classes at the National Academy of Design in New York. He soon developed a reputation for his paintings of dogs, hunting and western mining, and soon made enough money to study at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1883. He then studied in Paris at the prestigious atelier with William Bouguereau at the Acádemie Julian. From 1890, he also taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It is likely that all of his entered works were oil paintings. At least Full Cry, which was listed in an exhibition catalog as early as 1929, and Hunter’s Reverie took up the theme of fox hunting.