Copy after Rubens

Edwin Landseer's Copy after Rubens's Wolf and Fox Hunt brings an enormous hunting spectacle within the reach of a young painter's hand. Wolves turn against weapons and hounds, horses rear above them, and a mounted couple presides over the confusion. Landseer follows the Flemish composition closely, yet his small panel also exposes the work of translating it: sweeping passages of sky, flickering manes and vigorously brushed fur turn copying into an encounter with another painter's decisions. Made around 1824–26 and retained by Landseer until his death, this is an early working possession with a long subsequent collecting history. It now belongs to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which also owns the seventeenth-century painting that supplied its model.^[1][2]

The distinction between the two objects is essential. Landseer painted this copy in oil on wood, on a surface measuring 40.6 centimetres high by 60.6 centimetres wide. Rubens's source, currently attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop and dated about 1616, is an oil on canvas more than six times as wide. Landseer's panel is accession 1990.75; the Flemish canvas is 10.73. Looking at them together reveals both the attraction of an established composition and the practical intelligence required to remake its many bodies, textures and competing movements on a radically reduced scale.^[1][3]

A monumental picture reduced to a panel

At 245.4 by 376.2 centimetres, the Rubens canvas establishes a physical relationship with its spectator very different from that of Landseer's copy. Its horses, hunters and quarry occupy a field large enough to confront someone standing before it. The panel condenses that encounter into an image that can be examined at close quarters. Reduction changes the spectator's movement as well as the animals' apparent size: a broad sweep across a wall becomes a succession of short movements of the eye. Landseer preserves the arrangement's principal divisions, but he has to make each patch of light and colour carry more information in less space.^[2][3][14]

The difference can be followed from the outer edges towards the centre. At the left, a hunter in red braces himself behind a long weapon. Above him, a dark-clad rider turns across a brown horse. At the right, the pale horse and its green-clad rider form a much larger, brighter mass, with a woman on horseback immediately behind. Between these flanking groups, men press forward over a struggling assembly of animals. Landseer gives the scene a strong horizontal foundation while retaining the upward thrusts of weapons, heads and forelegs. The eye finds enough large shapes to understand the whole before it attempts to separate each interlocked body.^[14]

His copy follows the recognisable composition rather than extracting a single animal or figure. This matters to its usefulness. A study of a wolf alone might preserve anatomy or expression; a reduced version of the entire picture preserves the relations that make the wolf dramatic. Its upright body is held between the red hunter's weapon, the descending brown horse and the dogs crowding from below. The grey horse's lifted forequarters answer that rising movement from the other side. Such relationships survive reduction because Landseer attends to the structure connecting the figures, as well as to their individual appearance.^[2][14]

The panel therefore offers a different experience from a small, meticulously smoothed replica intended to conceal its own making. Its abbreviated passages remain visible, particularly in the sky and moving hair. Katharine Baetjer, in the Met's catalogue of British paintings, emphasises the freedom and lightness of Landseer's execution alongside its attention to colour and detail. Those qualities coexist: fidelity here depends on selecting and restating the effects that make the original legible, rather than giving every part an identical degree of finish.^[2]

Wolves, foxes and hounds in collision

The foreground gives the copy its most concentrated force. One wolf rises almost vertically, its head turned towards the weapon entering from the left. Its raised forelimb, open mouth and thick brown coat occupy the gap beneath the horse and rider. A second wolf stretches across the lower centre, turning its head back as dogs attack. These opposed directions make it difficult to find a stable route through the group. An animal's outline leads into another animal's head; a patch of pale fur gives way to a dark mouth or a paw. Landseer preserves the compression that makes the struggle seem to press against the picture's lower boundary.^[14]

The foxes change the scale within this encounter. A smaller russet animal at lower left looks upwards, while two overturned bodies lie near the bottom: one close to the centre, the other beneath the grey horse at the right. Their pointed faces and smaller proportions distinguish them from the larger wolves. The light underside of the central fox catches the eye against the dark mass above it. The corresponding light area at the right draws attention towards the horse's hind legs. These are consequential placements: the fallen quarry extends the violence across the foreground and prevents the brighter mounted group from becoming a detached passage of elegance.^[14]

Dogs belong to the hunting force, yet they also enter the same unstable tangle of exposed bodies. A pale hound stretches low across the right foreground; dark heads and open jaws emerge among the wolves' coats. Landseer does not distribute them in a neat procession behind their human masters. The hounds act at close quarters, where the distinct outlines of attacker and quarry become difficult to follow. There is no need to assign modern pedigree names to them to appreciate the visual distinction between the lithe, short-coated dogs and the heavier, shaggy wolves. The drama depends on those different bodily resources meeting under pressure.^[14]

The picture concentrates on resistance rather than on the distant pursuit alone. The wolves have been brought within reach, but the upright animal still occupies a commanding position near the centre of the action. Its body answers the hunters' approach with a counterforce. Walter Liedtke's catalogue discussion of the Rubens original singles out the wolves' muscular strain, fur and desperation as central to its effect. Landseer's copy retains that emphasis: the wild animals are surrounded, yet they remain visually powerful enough to organise the scene around themselves.^[15][14]

Horses, hunters and the opening beyond

Above the struggle, the two principal horses produce different kinds of energy. The brown horse at left faces towards the viewer, with its mane spreading sideways beneath the rider's dark costume. Its narrow, descending head brings the mounted figure into the space above the upright wolf. The grey horse at right turns more clearly across the picture, its curved neck and raised forequarters creating a large arc over the animals below. Landseer differentiates the horses through direction, tone and silhouette. The grey's pale neck opens a luminous area near the centre-right; the brown horse merges more closely with the dark coat and warm fur around it.^[14]

The grey rider's clothing makes that grouping especially conspicuous. Green fabric, a pale sleeve, golden boots and the saddle's angular shapes interrupt the rounded masses of the horse. The man looks back towards the encounter, while the woman behind him holds a bird of prey. Her feathered hat and expansive red skirt add another combination of sharp detail and broad colour. The copy preserves the contrast between these richly dressed riders and the less ceremonious men at the centre. Their clothing helps articulate rank before any historical explanation is supplied.^[15][14]

The central huntsmen occupy the narrow interval between horse and wolf. One raises a weapon, another brings a horn to his mouth, and faces turn towards the action from behind. Their bodies are partly obscured, but hands, faces and implements make their participation intelligible. In the copy, these small accents are particularly important because a few warm or bright strokes must distinguish a cheek from a sleeve, or a horn from the surrounding flesh. The group binds the large equestrian forms to the animals rather than filling an accidental gap between them.^[14]

The landscape offers a momentary release from this density. Beneath the left horse, a thin strip of green ground recedes towards a distant mounted figure and dogs. Above, the sky spreads behind weapons and streaming manes. These openings establish that the crowded foreground belongs to a more extensive hunt, while keeping its immediate confrontation dominant. Liedtke interprets the background party in the Rubens composition in relation to the horn sounding in the foreground. Landseer's retained distance allows the same connection between concentrated action and the larger gathering from which it has developed.^[15][14]

Colour and the visible act of copying

Landseer brings the many parts together through connected colour masses. Red at the left edge reappears in the woman's skirt at the right; the rider's green jacket stands against a pale expanse of horse and sky. Warm browns connect the left horse with the wolves, foxes and ground. The result is more organised than the abundance of separate incidents initially suggests. Colour gives the spectator a way to move through the image without disentangling every limb. Even the brightest passage, the grey horse's neck and mane, remains attached to darker masses through reins, saddle and the curve of the animal's body.^[14]

The copy makes this organisation unusually available to inspection because some transitions remain broad. In the sky, bands of blue-grey and warm light are visibly worked across the surface. The horse's white mane separates into curling, directional strokes rather than a uniform pale contour. Hair on the dark-clad rider and the golden-brown coats below is treated through different concentrations of touch. A small bright mark can establish the turn of a muzzle or a glinting eye without requiring a fully isolated outline. The surface's visible variety helps distinguish the animals' coats from the smoother clothing and the more open passages overhead.^[14]

Scale is crucial to the effect of these marks. A stroke wide enough to serve a cloud in the panel occupies a much larger proportion of the composition than a comparable stroke would in the great canvas. Landseer must coordinate descriptive detail with the danger of breaking a form into unrelated touches. The animals' coats are consequently most convincing when local marks also sustain the direction of a body: the upright wolf's rising mass, the second wolf's lateral stretch, the pale hound's low advance. Brushwork communicates movement partly by following these larger shapes.^[2][14]

Baetjer's account of the copy is valuable precisely because it recognises lively execution and close attention together. The image is neither a diagram of the composition nor an independent rearrangement of its subject. Its allegiance to Rubens can be followed in the major groupings, while Landseer's own decisions become visible in the compression of detail and the distribution of finish. The panel records an artist looking with a brush: translating not simply what the picture represents, but how its effects are made to work.^[2][14]

When Landseer encountered the source

The Met dates the panel approximately to 1824–26. Baetjer proposes the winter of 1824–25 as a likely moment for its execution, placing it close to the beginning of Landseer's major historical hunting picture, The Hunting of Chevy Chase. Her account also identifies an important development in the source painting's availability: the dealer John Smith brought the Rubens from Paris to England in 1824 and had sold it to Alexander Baring, later the first Lord Ashburton, by 1830. This supplies a concrete setting for Landseer's encounter without fixing an exact day, sitting or room.^[1][2]

The sequence needs care because the source later became closely associated with the Ashburton collection. The panel was described in Landseer's estate sale as a copy from Lord Ashburton's picture, and both works subsequently passed through Ashburton ownership. That later association does not by itself establish precisely when Baring acquired the Rubens or where Landseer painted every part of his reduction. The secure relationship is between the young artist, the newly available Flemish canvas and the small copy that remained with him. The approximate date reflects the surviving evidence more faithfully than an invented record of a particular visit.^[2][15]

The model itself was already an object with a complicated history. Liedtke traces it through Spanish collecting and its appearance in Paris before Smith's purchase. He also distinguishes the Met canvas from the hunting picture discussed in Rubens's negotiations with the English diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton. Those documents concern related versions and cannot simply be treated as a continuous ownership record for the painting Landseer saw. For understanding the copy, the important point is that a specific, physically available canvas supplied the image; the panel does not copy an abstract notion of Rubens's hunting style.^[15]

The source's boundaries have changed through trimming, but the copy should not be mistaken for a reconstruction of a demonstrably complete earlier state. Liedtke's examination of the evidence describes limited losses and cautions against assuming a vastly more extensive original view. His discussion of the related print and other copies does not establish a precise missing border recoverable from Landseer's panel. What the panel preserves is the configuration he painted in the 1820s, with its tightly packed foreground and high mounted figures.^[3][15]

An accomplished young painter studies an Old Master

Landseer was already experienced in animal painting when he made the copy. The act belongs to the further development of an established ability rather than to a beginner's first attempt to describe a horse or dog. Baetjer notes that his estate sale contained copies after Ter Borch, De Hooch and Steen, as well as two after Rubens. These retained works point to a continuing store of examples drawn from earlier painting. The Wolf and Fox Hunt panel's survival in the studio is particularly suggestive because it preserves a complete composition concerned with coordinated action on a large scale.^[2]

Joseph Rishel's discussion of Landseer's continental relationships places such study alongside his English artistic inheritance. British animal painters supplied important precedents, but Dutch and Flemish works offered additional models for narrative, dramatic intensity and ambitious compositions. Rishel also connects the young artist's formation with Benjamin Robert Haydon's emphasis on historical narrative and the antique. In this setting, studying Rubens had a practical significance beyond admiration for a celebrated name. It offered ways of arranging animals with human figures so that bodily action could carry a subject of wider narrative consequence.^[16]

The copy makes the distinction between isolated observation and composition tangible. Landseer could look closely at a dog's body from life, but the Rubens picture presented another problem: how to make many accurate bodies participate in one coherent event. A horse's head must relate to a wolf beneath it; a hunter's arm must draw the eye across the animal group; the pale horse must remain forceful without dissolving the balance with the left side. Copying the whole allowed these relationships to be rehearsed together. The panel's value as a working example lies in the linked arrangement, not solely in a collection of usable animal poses.^[2][14]

The model also brought together different painters' contributions. The Met's attribution recognises Rubens's workshop, while Liedtke's detailed discussion separates passages associated with assistants from the wolves, for which he argues strongly for Rubens's own hand. Earlier suggestions that the celebrated animal specialist Frans Snyders had painted the beasts are treated critically in that account. For Landseer, the finished image offered a unified encounter regardless of the division of labour behind it. His reduction brings that assembly into one small painted field: he has to negotiate the relationships between landscape, costume, horse and wolf across the entire surface. The source's collaborative execution and the copy's authorship are distinct questions, but considering both makes the panel's comprehensive scope particularly apparent.^[3][15][14]

Its retention also prevents a simple equation between youthful copying and discarded apprenticeship. Landseer did not dispose of it immediately after making a new picture. It remained among his possessions until 1873 and was sold with his estate the following year. This establishes continued ownership, although it cannot reveal how frequently he consulted the panel over the intervening decades. Its long survival gives the work a double character: evidence of a concentrated early encounter and a lasting part of the material environment of his career.^[2]

Hunting, rank and represented violence

The source composition presents hunting as an organised social activity with visibly unequal roles. The mounted figures possess space, height and expensive costume; the men on foot work nearer the animals. The woman carries a hawk, another sign of a privileged pursuit. Liedtke, drawing on the scholarship of David Rosand, reads the distinction between riders and retainers as a central feature of Rubens's European hunts. Landseer preserves those distinctions through the disposition of bodies and dress. The men performing the immediate physical work cluster at the wolves' level, while the elegant couple occupies the elevated right side.^[15][14]

The pale horse links these social levels rather than allowing them to remain separate. Its raised body supports the beautifully dressed rider, but its hind legs descend into the area occupied by an overturned fox. The saddle and golden boot belong to the display of rank; the animal beneath them belongs to the same encounter as the vulnerable quarry. Landseer gives both areas sufficient definition to keep the relation visible. A reading confined to the riders' splendour would miss the foreground, just as a reading concerned only with animal struggle would lose the hierarchy organising the hunt.^[15][14]

This is not a casual meeting of predators in an untouched landscape. Liedtke explains that bringing wolves and foxes together in such an encounter would involve driving and containing game within a larger organised hunt. The picture's compressed foreground gives the result of that activity, while the small figures and dogs in the distance suggest its reach. Its action is therefore both physical and social: the immediate clash depends on a wider structure of human control, even though the wolves resist that control with conspicuous force.^[15]

The large Rubens canvas also belonged to the decoration of elite interiors. Liedtke discusses monumental hunting pictures as comparatively economical alternatives to tapestries, suitable for the largest rooms in substantial houses. Landseer's small wooden copy transforms that function. It preserves an image of aristocratic sport while becoming a concentrated object for a painter's close attention. The very reduction shifts emphasis from occupying a grand interior to making the composition's organisation available for repeated scrutiny. The depicted hierarchy remains, but the object that carries it has acquired a different scale and use.^[2][15]

A working connection with The Hunting of Chevy Chase

The copy's relationship to The Hunting of Chevy Chase is supported by the Met's catalogue, which places Landseer's study of Rubens beside the preparation of his own first major history picture. That painting was under way in July 1825 and appeared at the Royal Academy in 1826. Baetjer describes the transfer of motifs and the stimulus of Rubens's lightness and precision. The connection is therefore more specific than a general claim that Flemish painting influenced Landseer: this retained panel belongs close to a documented moment when he was organising an ambitious narrative of hunters and animals.^[2]

The two compositions nevertheless serve different subjects. In the copy, Landseer follows the wolves, foxes, richly dressed hunters and mounted couple of the seventeenth-century model. In Chevy Chase, he develops a Scottish historical hunt, with different figures, costumes, setting and quarry. The panel helps explain how an existing arrangement could offer resources without dictating the eventual picture's entire meaning. Rubens supplies a powerful example of concentrated action; Landseer's historical painting makes that example answer another narrative.^[2][16]

Keeping the objects separate also clarifies their different kinds of invention. The panel's achievement lies in translation: selecting effects, compressing scale and sustaining the model's force. The historical canvas requires those lessons to be recomposed around a new subject. Neither task is adequately described by treating copying as the absence of judgement. The copy gives unusually direct access to the bridge between looking and making, because its correspondence with the model remains so close while its physical handling is recognisably the work of another painter.^[2][14]

From the studio sale to the Ashburton family

Landseer died in 1873. At the sale of his estate at Christie's, London, on 8 May 1874, the panel appeared as lot 143, described as The Wolf Hunt, after Rubens, from Lord Ashburton's picture. Baetjer records its sale for 105 guineas to a buyer named White. The description identifies the source by its then familiar collection and confirms that the panel was understood as Landseer's copy. It also shows how the work moved from a studio possession into the public mechanism of an auction, where maker, subject and association with another collection became concise sale information.^[2]

The panel subsequently belonged to Louisa, Lady Ashburton, at Kent House, London, until her death in 1903. Her husband, William Baring, the second Lord Ashburton, belonged to the family that owned the original Rubens. Baetjer suggests that Landseer's copy might have been purchased for Louisa at the studio sale, but this remains a suggestion rather than a documented identification of White's principal. The distinction matters because a plausible personal connection must not erase the named intermediary or convert a later ownership record into proof of an earlier commission or gift.^[2]

The next sale is more explicit. At Christie's on 8 July 1905, in Lady Ashburton's estate sale, the panel appeared as lot 9 under the title A Wolf-Hunt. It brought £94 10s., with Agnew buying for the Marquess of Northampton. William George Spencer Scott Compton, the fifth Marquess, owned it until his death in 1913. It then passed to Lady Loch at Stoke College in Suffolk, who retained it until 1970, and afterwards to George Henry Compton Loch, the third Baron Loch. The picture thus remained within the extended family across several generations, even as its location and title changed.^[2]

These changing titles describe the same small copy, rather than evidence for a lost second Landseer hunt. The modern title is more informative because it names both the act of copying and Rubens's complete subject. The older sale descriptions remain useful historical identifiers, but the panel's medium, dimensions and ownership chain prevent them from being mistaken for the enormous original. Both pictures once had an Ashburton association; only one remained among Landseer's own effects until his death.^[2][15]

Exhibitions, American ownership and the Met

Lord Loch sold the panel to Christopher Wood in 1983. Through Wood it entered the collection of Edmund J. and Suzanne McCormick, at Norcross in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Its appearance in Wood's London exhibition Victorian Fanfare that November placed the copy in a modern account of nineteenth-century painting, and it was shown at the Yale Center for British Art in early 1984 with the McCormick collection. These exhibitions belong to the panel's twentieth-century history; they do not establish that it was a publicly exhibited or widely discussed picture during Landseer's lifetime.^[2]

In 1988 it appeared in English Idylls, the Phoenix Art Museum exhibition of Victorian art from the McCormick collection. Edmund McCormick died that year, and Suzanne retained the work until the collection sale at Sotheby's, New York, on 28 February 1990, where it was lot 125. The Met acquired it in 1990 through the Wolfe Fund, as part of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection. Its accession records that acquisition, eighty years after the museum had acquired the Rubens canvas through the John Stewart Kennedy Fund.^[1][2][3]

The two histories now permit a particularly revealing comparison. The great Flemish canvas preserves the source's imposing bodies and elaborate orchestration; Landseer's panel preserves an early nineteenth-century painter's close engagement with them. Shared present ownership should not collapse that interval. One work was made by Rubens with workshop participation, the other by Landseer after it. Their materials, sizes, purposes and routes into the museum remain different, and those differences make their relationship more useful to look at.^[1][3][15]

Landseer's copy is most compelling when its fidelity and activity are considered together. The composition is borrowed, but the work of seeing is sustained across every part of the panel: identifying the large masses, recovering the animals within them, judging which details must remain sharp and which can be carried by a moving stroke. Its survival from the studio, through family collections and modern exhibitions, has preserved something more specific than a tribute to Rubens. It preserves the practical form of an encounter, in which a young animal painter tested how another artist had made a crowded hunt hold together.^[2][14]