Dead Game, 1730 – Charles Collins | National Gallery of Ireland

This painting hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. It was painted in 1730. It is one of the most quietly unsettling things in the collection.

Dead Game is a still life of the aftermath of a hunt — a hare, a musket, and several birds arranged on a ledge with the kind of care and precision that makes you forget, briefly, that everything in the painting is dead. Charles Collins painted fur and feathers the way other artists painted silk and jewellery. The hare’s coat catches the light. The birds’ wings hold their shape. The whole composition glows against a dark atmospheric background with a confidence that has not faded in nearly three hundred years.

This is what power looked like in eighteenth-century Ireland. Landed families did not hang portraits of their victories in battle — they hung paintings of their game. Dead Game was made to sit in a dining room above a fireplace, a statement of sporting authority dressed as decoration. Collins understood exactly what he was being asked to paint, and he delivered it at the highest possible level.

Collins (1680–1744) served as Bird Painter to the Royal Society — not an honorary title but a working brief, painting animals with the precision of scientific illustration and the eye of a fine artist. Dead Game is among his finest surviving oils, 56 × 104 cm of paint on canvas commissioned by the Irish aristocracy and now held permanently in the national collection.

At 100 × 150 cm, this is a painting that fills a wall the way the original filled a great house. It is not background art. It is a conversation piece, a provocation, and a serious work of Irish visual history — for a dining room, a country hallway, a library, or any interior where the person furnishing it is not afraid of something that demands to be looked at.

The original hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Object number NGI.594.

Printed on 250gsm fine-art matte paper — acid-free, FSC-certified, built to last.

• Archival-quality printing for exceptional colour depth and detail
• Matte, uncoated natural white finish
• Acid-free to prevent yellowing over time
• FSC-certified sustainable paper
• Available framed or unframed
• Premium solid wood frames with shatter-resistant plexiglass
• Ready to hang