IT is so long since I read Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour by the great Robert Surtees that I had to scrabble a bit to place the references to ‘Lucy Glitters’ and ‘the Nonsuch Hunt’ on the artist’s label on the reverse of a Munnings in Christie’s London sale of European 19th- and 20th-century paintings early this summer. It was the 44in by 70in Who’s the Lady? (Fig 3), which was sold, together with two oil studies, for £226,800.
Mr Sponge, Surtees’s scoundrelly antihero, was a horse coper and always on the hunt for a well-dowered bride, but, eventually,
