Dying Stag

Landseer's Dying Stag from around 1830 engages with the tradition of sublime animal painting that his mentor Benjamin Robert Haydon and the Romantic generation had developed from the horse paintings of George Stubbs and James Ward. The dying stag — brought to bay by hounds, its magnificent Highland setting providing the tragic grandeur context — participates in the Romantic aestheticization of death that saw in the death of noble animals a displaced meditation on human mortality and the violence of nature. Landseer spent considerable time in Scotland, where he made studies of deer and Highland scenery that grounded his romantic subjects in direct observation. His ability to combine emotional sentiment with pictorial truth made his animal paintings both critically respected and enormously popular, an unusual combination in Victorian artistic culture.

The stag's exhausted, suffering posture is rendered with dramatic intensity. Landseer's brushwork captures the animal's magnificent antlers and muscular form even in extremis, with the dark background heightening the pathos of the scene.