Rabbit Catches

John Faed was a remarkably gifted child who by the age of 12 had left school and set himself up as a painter of miniatures in his native Scottish region of Dumfries and Galloway. He later moved to Edinburgh and became a highly successful portrait artist, as did several of his siblings. In 1864 Faed moved to London, where his success continued. In 1869 he commissioned a house to be built in his hometown of Gatehouse of Fleet and subsequently split his time between there and London. Faed found some of his favourite models for his genre paintings in Gatehouse. One of these models was Sandy Inglis, an elderly farmer who lived in the town with his sister. Inglis appears in 14 of FaedÂ’s paintings, including Rabbit Catches. Inglis is depicted as a poacher in Rabbit Catches, with two dead animals clearly depicted in the foreground. The central figure of Inglis is set against a backdrop of Galloway forest. This handsome painting now returns to Galloway as part of the Stewartry Museum collection in Kirkcudbright, the county town just seven miles from where Faed was born.