Page:Cricket (Hutchinson, 1903).djvu/17

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PREFACE
ix

from the wicket in the picture of "Cricket" by F. Hayman, R.A. (vide p. 1), in the possession of the Marylebone Club, though the date of the latter is as early as 1743. Neither does the bat appear to have made much evolution in the interval. It is on the authority of Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, in the catalogue above quoted, that we can give "about 1750" for the date of the picture named "A Match in Battersea Fields" (vide p. 3), in which St. Paul's dome appears in the background. Here they seem to be playing with the three stumps, early as the date is. Again, in the fine picture, "painted for David Garrick" by Richard Wilson, of "Cricket at Hampton Wick" (vide p. 375), three stumps are in use, and the bat has become much squared and straightened. Of course the pictures obviously fall into two chief classes—one in which "the play's the thing"; the cricket is the object of the artist's representation; the other in which the cricket is only used as an incidental feature in the foreground, to enliven a scene of which the serious interest is in the background or surroundings. But the pictures in which the cricket is the main, if not the only, interest are very much more numerous. A quaintly suggestive picture enough is that described in Sir-S. Ponsonby-Fane's catalogue as, "Situation of H.M.'s Ships Fury and Hecla at Igloolie. Sailors playing Cricket on the Ice." In this, of