Once the only pictures we bought were of horses and hounds. Not any longer. All the more reason to buy

Reggie Paget, the Labour peer, hoped that his death would be in a foxhunting accident, the same as his father. But his passion for the chase brought him nothing more glamorous than a fractured neck.

Lord Paget was the last in a long line of rumbustious country squires. While keeping up with changing times sufficiently to become a Labour MP, he remained Master of Fox Hounds of the Pytchley hunt. In the House of Lords, he once greeted a delegation of trade unionists while dressed in muddy hunting clothes.

Sotheby's auction of the contents of his home, Lubenham Lodge, in the heart of Leicestershire hunting country, (Tuesday 11am), will give a glimpse of a bygone world. Besides the ormolu-mounted Meissen figures and Georgian mahogany, there will be his sporting pictures by artists whose work was once eagerly sought by country gentry throughout the land: Ferneley, Sartorius, Wolstenholme, Munnings.

His ancestors were patrons of the Ferneleys, father and son. The sale contains not only paintings by John Ferneley senior (1782-1860) but his sketchbook with 48 drawings, modestly estimated at pounds 3,000-pounds 4,000. Lord Paget's father, Guy, wrote The Melton Mowbray of John Ferneley, and his copy inscribed: "First copy off the press, all smoking hot", is estimated at pounds 500-pounds 700. The John Ferneleys range from pounds 6,000-pounds 8,000 to pounds 30,000-pounds 40,000. A charming, slightly naive painting by John Sartorius of 1778 of a horse jumping a gate in the old-fashioned manner - from standstill - is pounds 3,000- pounds 4,000.

Today, there is little sporting art on public display outside historic houses. The decline of bloodsports and horse-riding has seen to that. A painting by Lionel Edwards of the Queen aged four, at her first hunt, watching a fox pursued by the hounds of the Pytchley, strikes an incongruous note (pounds 4,000-pounds 6,000).

But for more than two centuries, for those with the money to buy, art meant sporting art. The stamping ground of the British ruling class was the country, not the city. During the 18th century, hunting became the ruling passion, more absorbing than making war or building palaces. Even the sessions of parliament were regulated by the hunting and shooting seasons.

Sporting art was the first English school of painting, if only because, before 1660, most commissioned paintings were by foreigners.

Today's buyers of sporting art - now sold rather half-heartedly in general auctions of British pictures - are still mostly British, but Americans are buying more strongly and so are continentals. Both appear to appreciate what we have forgotten - that sporting pictures offer a unique record of a way of life.

Foxhunting was a madcap world of its own, whose capital was the otherwise sleepy town of Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire - better known today for pork pies. In early Victorian times, it attracted the country's rich, reckless young bloods and supported four packs of foxhounds, including the still-famous Quorn. More than 700 horses would be stabled there from November until April, ready to be ridden to death on 80-mile chases after foxes, or to break their necks for high gambling stakes in drunken midnight cross-country races.

Weaklings, both human and equine, were soon found out. The magazine Punch was filled with hunting cartoons mocking those who failed the test of character in the field. In an 1865 example, a weedy-looking horseman with monocle and goatee, baulking at the first stone wall, says: "Confound it! Now I recollect I promised the Bouncer girls I'd go there and play billiards with them this afternoon."

The sporting artists of the day were as rakish as their patrons. Today's collectors develop an affection for them, as much because of their scurrilous tricks - signing pupils' work as their own, beating deadlines by collaborating with other artists on the same canvas - as in spite of them.

The prolific but profligate George Morland, whose scenes of life in stable and tavern were immensely popular, died a drunken pauper aged 41 in 1804, having spent most of his time away from the easel dodging creditors or in jail. He put his signature on his pupils' work and would sell the same picture twice over, cursing when forced to paint a replica after being found out.

Neither he, nor others of the Melton Mowbray school of painting, were strictly sporting painters. The great portraitist Ben Marshall (1767-1835) - to whom John Ferneley, a Meltonian hunting farmer, was apprenticed - was no horseman. Nevertheless, his delineation of character, of both man and beast, was unerring. He dared to do what Ferneley and Dean Wolstenholme, a ruined Yorkshire squire who painted to earn money for hunting, would never have dared to do - painting Lord Paget's beloved Pytchley hounds in all their scruffiness - scarcely a couple out of the same litter. Is this why Lord Paget's 18 lots of sporting art contain seven paintings by the Ferneleys, one Wolstenholme, but no Marshalls? Wolstenholme's magnificent Meet of the Essex Harriers, incidentally, is estimated in the sale at only pounds 8,000-pounds 12,000.

The knowledgeable are bound to send its price higher but, as a whole, this remains a buyer's market. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed on the verge of perking up, only to disappoint once again. In the past year, however, Sotheby's David Moore-Gwyn has been encouraged by the healthy prices paid by private buyers for paintings by James Seymour (1702-1752), pioneer of the horse portrait. Significantly, these were not of gory foxhunting but of racing. A Groom on Flying Childers, estimated pounds 50,000-pounds 70,000 in November, fetched pounds 287,000.

There is scarcely any gore in Lord Paget's collection, though a painting of digging out a fox by Charles Lorraine Smith, squire, fiddle-player and deputy master of the Quorn, will not appeal to modern sensibilities. Auctioneers prefer not to auction animal-baiting pictures, though a representative collection of the work of Henry Alken would include cock-fighting, bull and badger baiting. The Scots, judging by last month's sale of pictures at the Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, are the least squeamish about pictures of dead stags oozing blood.

London dealer Peter Johnson summed up continental buyers' sanitised aesthetic of sporting art: "They've recognised what the English haven't - in order to produce a good sporting painting, you've got to have landscape in the true tradition of English landscape painting to the standard of Stubbs - and then fit your horse into it."

He has exhibited sporting pictures as "sporting landscape": "How many people realise that we have such a beautiful landscape because it was farmed in order to hunt and shoot? Hedges were left for birds to roost, coverts were for cover and the strip around fields was for horses to canter on. Sporting art is both sociologically and historically interesting - and will become even more so if they stop bloodsports."

For those who find they cannot afford prices in the thousands, Christie's South Kensington sales of decorative prints offer cheaper fare. In April, pounds 67 bought a pair of 1813 framed aquatints of a jolly, fat gamekeeper and a hare chase. Christie's spokeswoman Louise Martin advises beginners to rummage through unframed prints up for auction. Learning to spot less valuable reprints is the first requirement.

John Sabin, the London sporting print dealer, reckons there are few genuine "period" sporting prints - that is, 1750-1850 - to be had below pounds 400-pounds 500. There is no shortage of reprints of the 1880s and 1890s - "re-strikes" from plates that first yielded prints between 1830 and 1860.

Start collecting the prolific Henry Alken (1785-1851) or the Pollards, father Robert (1756-1838) and son James (1772-1867), he suggests. But first, take advice on how to spot bald patches in aquatints from overworked plates and the tell-tale brightness of more modern papers.

Arthur Ackermann and Peter Johnson, 27 Lowndes St, London SW1 (0171-235 6464). Richard Green, 44 Dover Street, London W1 (0171-493 3939). Frank Sabin, 5, Royal Arcade, London W1 (0171-493 3288).