Pet portrait oil painting

Pet portrait oil painting
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After a very productive morning of bass fishing at SouthWind Plantation near Bainbridge, Ga., I was awaiting lunch in the main lodge. Of course, bass fishing was not to be the main attraction. An invitation from Ed Weatherby had brought me there to hunt quail with Weatherby's new D'ltalia side by sides. A rainy morning brought on the bass fishing, since I'm less averse to fishing in the rain than hunting in it.

As I strolled through the beautiful lodge, my eyes were drawn to a large oil painting of two pointers. My artistic eye is admittedly untrained, but the painting seemed to blend various aspects of classic 19th century dog art.

The Pet portrait oil painting themselves were painted with close attention to anatomy, yet with strokes that transcended realism. The landscape oil painting was muted almost to impressionism, like a memory in which most of the details have gone vague except the cherished sight of the dogs. This trait called to mind the work of Percival Rosseau. And yet the dogs’ tails were perfectly parallel, a famous touch of Edmund Osthaus.

I figured the painting must have cost a fortune, coming as it probably did from one of the managers, and I strode over to see which one had painted it. To my surprise, a thin red signature in the lower right corner read: “Dargan Long, 12-06.”
“Who in the world is Dargan Long?” I thought out loud.“Oh, Dargan’s one of the boys that guides here at the lodge,” drawled the cook. She directed my attention to another smaller painting that hung over the back of a mounted whitetail deer. This one depicted two setters on point in the piney woods. Their mouths were slightly ajar, like dogs that have run far on a warm day.
“Yeah, that Dargan,” she observed, “he’s really talented.”“When can I meet this man?” I asked.“Well, Honey,” she said—I love the way Southern women talk—“we can introduce you to him after lunch.”

That afternoon, it was my pleasure to hunt with Dargan Long over his own Pet portrait oil painting: Maggie, a Llewellin setter; Rex, a German shorthair; and Jack, an English cocker. Even the names of his dogs hearken to an earlier time, much like his paintings. Although Long may share talent and style with some of the old masters, his story is decidedly less aristocratic than theirs. And the story is worth telling, because the art emerges from it.“My father died when I was three years old,” he said.