Male Bonding, Self-Fashioning, and Virile Creativity: Artists as Hunters in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter explores hunting and shooting as a sphere of allegedly unquestioned masculinity in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. It examines which roles the cultural practice of the hunt, which largely excluded women after its civic legalization, played in the formation of homosocial bonds among men on the one hand and, on the other hand, in the characterization of hunters as masculine, virile, and sovereign. To do so, this chapter focuses on visual artists as an exemplary group that, by profession, does not have an overly strong connection to hunting and therefore can be considered representative of broader circles of the bourgeois middle and upper classes. The case study is based on a set of nineteenth-century portraits that depict artists as hunters and have been largely neglected by art historical research to date.