Hunting expeditions in the Scottish Highlands are traditionally accompanied by outdoor servants known as gillies. This young gillie carefully collects the spoils of the hunt, including a hare and a brace of pheasants. The scene evokes Dutch still life paintings like those of Jan Weenix (1640/9–1719), who specialised in arrangements of dogs and dead game. The three setters direct their alert gaze in different directions. An early critic observed that it was ‘almost an insult’ to call these well-trained gundogs ‘dumb animals’. James Hardy was not Scottish, but he specialised in Highland sporting scenes. Paintings like this found ready buyers among the community of Victorian sportsmen who visited the North of Scotland. Hardy was almost certainly the artist of the same name who died of ‘exhaustion from melancholia’ at the Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, founded by Thomas Holloway in 1885.