# Samuel Howitt artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/samuel-howitt/
Profile generated: 2026-05-12T19:46:30.000Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Nationality: English, British
- Movements: British sporting art
- Common media: watercolor, oil painting, etching, engraving, illustration

## About Samuel Howitt

Samuel Howitt (1756–1822) was an English painter, illustrator, etcher, and watercolorist best known for his vivid depictions of animals, hunting, horse racing, and sporting subjects. Active from the 1770s through the early 1820s, Howitt worked across oils, watercolors, and printmaking, producing both finished gallery pictures and illustrations for published sporting books. His most recognized contributions include plates for the illustrated volume Foreign Field Sports, Fisheries, Sporting Anecdotes, which depicted hunting and outdoor pursuits from around the world, including Indian field sports—scenes he rendered without ever having traveled to India himself. Howitt's work belongs to the broader tradition of British sporting art, a genre that flourished in the late Georgian era and remains actively collected today. His images combine careful animal observation with the narrative energy of the chase, making him a distinctive figure among late-eighteenth-century British sporting artists.

## Common works and media

Howitt's output includes hand-colored etchings and engravings of hunting, horse racing, animal, and field-sport subjects; watercolor studies of animals and sporting scenes; oil paintings of similar themes; and book illustrations, most notably plates for Foreign Field Sports, Fisheries, Sporting Anecdotes. Individual prints and plates from published works are the most commonly available category in auction contexts, followed by watercolor drawings. Original oil paintings are comparatively scarce.

## Market and appraisal context

Samuel Howitt's works appear regularly at auction, encompassing original watercolors, oil paintings, hand-colored etchings, and engraved book plates. The most frequently encountered category is printed sporting illustration, particularly plates from Foreign Field Sports and similar published series, where condition, hand-coloring quality, and completeness of the set or folio can affect value. Original watercolors and oils are less common and may command stronger interest from sporting-art specialists. Attribution can be complicated by the variant name forms recorded in authority files, including William Samuel Howitt. Collectors evaluating Howitt works should consider medium, subject (hunting and racing scenes versus landscape), provenance, plate or sheet condition, and whether the work is an original or a published reproduction.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine structured artist-identity research from museum, library-authority, and encyclopedia sources with auction-house records, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots when those records are available. For Samuel Howitt, identity and biographical data are grounded in records from the Tate, the RKD, Getty ULAN, VIAF, and Wikidata. Market observations draw on published source context and the auction-lot data Appraisily aggregates.

## Sources

- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7411741
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Howitt
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500124269
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/76588044/
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/96598945/
- Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/samuel-howitt-280
- RKD: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/40166