RICHARD ANSDELL, R.A. | HOME OF THE RED DEER

E. Allday esq., Edgbaston, by whom sold, Christie's, London, 16 March 1895, lot 33 for 168 guineas to 'Marshall';

Private collection

London, Royal Academy, 1877, no.141

Edinburgh, Malcolm Innes Gallery, Lytham Hall and London, Richard Green Gallery, Richard Ansdell R.A. 1815-1885, A Centenary Exhibition, 1985, no.46

Home of the Red Deer is reminiscent of Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen painted in 1851 (purchased earlier this year by the National Galleries of Scotland), perhaps the most famous Victorian painting of an animal. In both pictures the artists celebrate the majesty of Britain’s largest land animal, which became a metaphor for potency, nobility and dignity in the nineteenth century. Following Landseer’s death in 1877 Richard Ansdell continued in his wake as the primary animal painter of his generation. He had turned to specifically Scottish subjects in response to the great fashion for paintings of the Highlands that occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century. However he may have waited until after Landseer’s death to paint such a large and imposing depiction of a red deer stag with his herd on a rocky and mist-clad peak.