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THBPercival Rosseau (1859-1937), The Pointer-Deep River-Jim
About Seller
20 Winter Street
Pembroke, MA 02359
United States
Founded in 2005, Copley Fine Art Auctions is a boutique auction house specializing in antique decoys and American, sporting, and wildlife paintings. Over the course of the last two decades, the firm has set auction records for not only individual decoy makers, but also entire carving regions. Copley...Read more
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About Auction
LiveFeb 20, 2026
Lots 1-300 Copley Fine Art Auctions cinnie@copleyart.com
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- Lot Description
Percival Rosseau (1859-1937)
The Pointer-Deep River-Jim, 1913
signed and dated "Rosseau 1913" lower left
oil on canvas, 15 by 22 in.
Percival Rosseau was born near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1859. Although considered a premier painter of sporting dogs, he did not pick up a paintbrush until the age of thirty-five. After leaving an eclectic business career, Rosseau sailed to Paris to attend the Académie Julian, where his entry at the 1904 Paris Salon, a painting of a pair of Irish wolfhounds, garnered pivotal acclaim. He then returned to the United States where he found a ready market for his work among wealthy sportsmen, including Percy Rockefeller, nephew of oil tycoon John. D. Rockefeller and a successful businessman in his own right.
This pair of iconic sporting dog paintings bears the title "Deep River," likely named after the Deep River in North Carolina near High Point, where wealthy industrialist Clarence H. Mackay built his hunting lodge, Deep River Lodge, in 1904. To run the property, which included kennels for one hundred dogs, Mackay employed breeder, handler, and manager Edward "Ned" Armstrong from Britain. The Armstrong family later bought the land, lodge, and kennel at auction from Mackay's estate in 1938. Though they sold some of the land for development, Ned Armstrong continued to use the "Deep River" kennel name for many years.
A 1913 Field Dog Stud Book lists three Deep River dogs owned by C. H. Mackay of Roslyn, New York, and in a 1915 report of the Westminster Kennel Club noted, "Sporting Dogs were very good. Jay Gould received much praise for the way he handled pointeres while the return of that sterling sportsman, Clarence H. Mackay, as an exhibitor was greeted with unstinted applause...May Queen B just beat the home-bred Deep River Georgie, which made one of the winning team for Clarence H. Mackay."
Among Mackay's hunting accomplishments, he presented his collection of specimen moose, elk, and bison to the Boone and Crockett Club in 1911-1912 as part of the National Collection of Heads and Horns, which had its own building at the Bronx Zoo from 1922 until the 1940s. His son John penned the book "Mark!" in 1956 about his hunting escapades, with a section on Deep River Lodge.
T. Edward Nickens wrote, "For a few decades around the turn of the 20th century, North Carolina was known as one of the nation's glamour spots for well-heeled Northern hunters. In the 1890s, the Southern Railway Company extended lines to High Point and Greensboro, and suddenly, access to North Carolina's Piedmont was but a 17-hour train ride from New York, short enough passage for a long-weekend lark. Flush with the spoils of the Gilded Age, wealthy hunters flooded in...the rolling farm country of central North Carolina hosted the wealthy and the powerful, drawing hunters and pointing dogs to a landscape that has all but vanished." In 2023, the High Point Museum held an exhibition to commemorate and remember this golden age, "Fields and Feathers: Hunting at Deep River Lodge, 1895-1935."
These two paintings are artifacts of America's golden age of sporting art, depicting two dogs from a famed kennel in Rosseau's classic, Barbizon-inspired style.
Provenance: Red Fox Gallery
Robert S. Doochin Collection
Literature: T. Edward Nickens, "Welcome to Quail Country," in "Our State," October 27, 2020.
Charles G. Hopton, "Bench and Kennels, in "The Spur," March 15, 1915, p. 42.Condition
Please email condition report requests to leah@copleyart.com.
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