The great portraitist Ben Marshall (1767-1835) - to whom John Ferneley, a Meltonian hunting farmer, was apprenticed - was no horseman. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 John Ferneleys range from pounds 6,000-pounds 8,000 to pounds 30,000-pounds 40,000. 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 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. 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. 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. It will dominate the north London landscape, but it may never come to be as symbolic as Canterbury is for Anglicans.

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. The temple is much smaller; in the prayer hall, men are segregated from women and the sweets are not as good. The priest, Mr Halai, said no, he had no plans to go to the Neasden one.So while the architecture of the temple may represent the first and most fantastic spread of Hinduism since the heyday of the religion, more than a 1,000 years ago when it reached out to Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia - of this only the temples in Cambodia and the small community in Bali remain - it is a temple of a small sect.