282 The Dog Book 



Galle, or Galleus, and published at Antwerp in 1578. Strada's lifetime is 

 given as 1536-1612, and Galle's as 1537-1612, and, as there are more than 

 one hundred of these sporting scenes, occupying in painting and engraving 

 considerable time, to say nothing of other works of art each was engaged 

 upon, we may say with confidence that they were painted from 1560 to 1570. 

 In the full bound collection there is an important one representing a smooth 

 dog resembling the smooth one in the duck-shooting scene, but with a few 

 spots on the body. It is standing, with one raised forefoot and is pointing 

 at a bevy of quail, over which two men are drawing a net toward the dog. 

 Strada painted most of his dogs rather fat and podgy, and this is not 

 an exception. A representation of camel shooting on a seashore shows 

 two sailors, one with his matchlock resting in the bend of his elbow when 

 being fired, while the other kneeling is firing from his shoulder with his left 

 elbow on his knee. The latter style is also shown in a deer-shooting scene 

 with the stalking horse. Strada never gave a genuine shooting from 

 the shoulder without rest, but there is such a one in a small collection of 

 smaller prints representing hunting, fishing and fowling from paintings by 

 Hans Bol, 1 534-1 593. These were also engraved in part by Philip Galle, 

 and undoubtedly show sport of a little later date than the Strada paintings. 

 Some of the guns are shorter in the stock, and in a wolf-hunting scene a 

 man standing erect is shooting with one of these from the shoulder, without 

 rest, at a wolf attacked by dogs. This small volume was issued at Brabant 

 in 1582, and if we give 1575 as a very late date for the painting by Bol it 

 throws the Strada paintings fully ten years before that. 



From an excellent article on guns published in the Sporting Magazine 

 of 1792, we take the following: "Still the crossbow was continued long 

 after the introduction of the arquebuse, and not dropped entirely till toward 

 the end of the fifteenth century, when the arquebuse was first brought to the 

 perfection of enabling the sportsman to shoot flying. But such was the 

 length of time taken to improve this instrument both in its form and use, 

 owing to its advocates and enemies, that it was not without the consumma- 

 tion of argument in Nicholas Spadoni, a grave Spaniard, the matchlock 

 was finally proscribed and the decided superiority awarded to the springlock 

 and flint. They must have been, indeed, the most awkward kind of locks 

 imaginable, if some people could reasonably plead for the quickness of 

 discharge by the matchlocks in preference to them." 



The engravings referred to show Continental sports, and we have those 



