THE BLACK-AND-TAN SETTER 



A SPORTING parson of the middle of the eighteenth century 

 tells us that the English setters were then of two colours, 

 red-and-white and black-and-tan. Whether the author meant 

 to say black-white-and-tan seems a little doubtful, but in any 

 case there were black-white-and-tan setters long before this, as 

 is evidenced in one of Diirer's pictures, and this Flemish artist 

 died in 1528. When this picture was exhibited at the Grosvenor 

 Gallery in 1891, it escaped the notice of the author in spite of 

 several visits, but Mr. Rawdon Lee describes the dog illustrated 

 as a black-white-and-tan setter, less spaniel-like and more on 

 the leg than the modern show setter. Then, half a century 

 later, our earliest writer on the dog mentions the setter, or index, 

 as a distinct dog from the spaniel, and at the same time throws 

 doubt upon the Spanish origin of the latter. It was in 1570 

 that Dr. Caius of Cambridge wrote upon the dog ; unfortunately 

 he appears to have known nothing except the duties of the 

 setter, for he does not describe either its origin, its colour, or 

 appearance. 



It has been said that the Duke of Gordon got the black-and- 

 tan colour by crossing with the collie, but the majority of the 

 Gordon Castle dogs were black-white-and-tan, and some were 

 red-and-white. That is to say, they may have been and probably 

 were the colours that the eighteenth-century writer meant when 

 he described those of the " English spaniel " that is, the English 

 setter. 



About 1873 the author had a long talk with the late Lord 

 Lovat and his keeper, Bruce, at the kennels above the famous 



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