"Too Late"
12x9 Oil on Panel
SOLD

     Two members of a 1912 hunting party on safari in Massailand are enjoying lunch at a fly camp. A simple "ploughman’s lunch" (cheese and bread) washed down with ginger beer (a non-alcoholic British brew). It is a small safari:  one client, a White Hunter, a couple of gunbearers and four boys (a Massai Tracker, tent servant and two M’pishis (cooks) )
     It is a hot dry day and the hunters are exhausted from a long fruitless morning trek through acacia and scrub. They are totally unprepared for the sudden rush of a male lion – seemingly out of nowhere. The White Hunter grabs his Purdy .470 Nitro Express Double Rifle, but it is too late. The lion, wounded earlier by a Massai herdsman’s spear, eyes burning with a scintillating light, barrels into the White Hunter, fatally mauling him before the client and gunbearers can get off a shot.

     Still wounded, the lion made its escape, but was eventually tracked and brought down by the client who returned to Nairobi with both the hunter’s body and that of the lion.

     This study might be used to produce a major painting.