The Hunting of Chevy Chase

Edwin Landseer's The Hunting of Chevy Chase gives its mounted hunters the equipment of heroes, but lets the animals carry the violence. A dark horse rises beneath an armoured rider; an archer takes aim from the left; a horn and several raised weapons announce organised pursuit. Below them, a stag lowers its antlers into a twisting knot of hounds. The historical figures command the upper part of the picture, while the foreground makes their sport a contest of bodies, jaws and resistance. Painted in 1825–26, this was an ambitious attempt to turn animal painting into a subject with the scale and consequence of history.^[1][2]

Its title invokes a border ballad in which a deer hunt provokes battle between the English Earl of Northumberland and the Scottish Earl Douglas. Landseer chose the hunt before that confrontation, rather than the deaths that conclude the story. The choice gives the apparently triumphant sporting scene an uneasy future: viewers who know the ballad recognise that the men directing the slaughter will themselves be drawn into it.^[2][3]

The painting is in Birmingham's collection, accession 1952P2. It began as a commission from the sixth Duke of Bedford for a private aristocratic setting, appeared publicly at the Royal Academy in 1826 and the British Institution in 1827, and entered Birmingham's collection in the following century. Its early reception was exceptionally enthusiastic, although later writers were less persuaded by the union of literary history and animal action.^[1][2][4][5]

A sporting subject on the scale of history

The canvas measures 143.5 by 170.8 centimetres unframed in the institutional checklist for the touring exhibition Victorian Radicals. That record dates it 1825–26 and identifies the medium as oil on canvas. The framed dimensions are considerably larger, but belong to the object with its surrounding frame, not to the painted field.^[1] At well over a metre high, the picture gives the spectator a bodily encounter with its densely grouped figures. It is far removed from a small record of a favourite dog or an incidental hunting vignette.

Scale changes the hierarchy of attention. The stag and dogs are brought close to the lower edge, where their heads, limbs and coats can compete with the mounted men above. The horse helps connect those levels: its broad dark body occupies the middle ground, while its raised forelegs and flying mane extend the turmoil upward. The human claim to leadership is obvious, yet it does not make the action easy to govern visually. A viewer must negotiate the animals before reaching the historical personages.

Richard Ormond describes the work as both a history painting and a heroic sporting picture in the tradition of seventeenth-century Flemish art.^[2] The categories overlap here because hunting supplies action, rank, costume and an inherited narrative. The picture's ambition does not depend on illustrating an actual battle. It depends on making the chase large enough, complicated enough and sufficiently charged with literary expectation to carry the gravity usually associated with one.

The foreground belongs to the animals

The principal stag occupies the right of the central struggle, with its body rising above a head forced low among the hounds. Antlers extend across the group, setting a branching framework against the more elastic curves of dogs' bodies. Several pale hounds twist through the centre; darker and brindled animals press in from the sides. Open mouths, lifted paws, stretched necks and overlapping flanks prevent the group from settling into a simple decorative pattern. The eye repeatedly encounters a body whose direction cuts across the movement of another.

Light makes this congestion readable. The near-white hounds provide the brightest concentration in the foreground, while the stag's warm coat and the darker dog at its side anchor the group against the ground. The pale forms are not interchangeable patches. A muzzle, an exposed underside, a shoulder or a bent leg keeps each fragment attached to a particular body, even where the contours become difficult to follow. Landseer makes the spectator work through the collision rather than looking past it towards a single clean silhouette.

The animal at the lower-left edge has already fallen or been brought down; its prone body gives weight to the moving group behind. To the right, the lighter hind rises in a leap, opening a different route through the composition. The contrast is temporal as well as formal. One body lies close to the earth, another struggles under concentrated pressure, and another appears to spring away. These are different conditions within the hunt, rather than a diagram of one animal's progress from freedom to death.

Ormond traces the central stag-and-hound idea to an earlier Hunting Scene, made before about 1820, and relates a crushed dog motif to Landseer's early Bull Attacked by Dogs.^[2] These comparisons show that the animal action was not invented suddenly when the artist selected a ballad. It grew from a sustained interest in how bodies meet under force. The later literary setting gave an existing visual problem a new scale and social frame.

The scene also resists the comfortable division between active dogs and passive quarry. The stag's lowered antlers, the dogs' exposed bodies and the abrupt turns of heads make resistance part of the encounter. Pursuit has become close contact, and proximity endangers more than one participant. No clinical account of individual wounds is needed to recognise that vulnerability. The image communicates it through pressure, imbalance and the difficulty of disentangling one creature from the next.

Earl Percy above the struggle

The central rider is identified in the painting's literary interpretation as Earl Percy, the English nobleman whose decision to hunt precipitates the ballad's conflict.^[2] He raises a short spear above the dark horse, his arm and weapon forming a strong diagonal across the sky. Metal armour catches small accents of light, while the horse's head and mane turn the rider's controlled pose into a more turbulent unit. The man appears ready to direct or complete the action, but the animal beneath him makes that authority physically unstable.

Around him, the attendants distribute the practical and ceremonial roles of hunting. An archer at the left draws his bow; a mounted figure behind carries a horn; other men hold weapons or watch the quarry. The hawk near the upper-left figure adds another form of aristocratic pursuit. The ensemble presents the chase as an organised human enterprise, not a spontaneous encounter between wild creatures. Clothing, equipment and arrangement turn a group of individuals into a company with a leader.

Ormond's analysis of the armour complicates any claim to archaeological reconstruction. He identifies elements drawn from different centuries in Percy's equipment, including a fifteenth-century cuirass, later leg protection and a fourteenth-century type of helmet. He regards some attendants' helmets as imaginary, while noting more specific features such as the archer's protective equipment and the crescent badge on the horn-bearer's tunic.^[2] Landseer was assembling an intelligible historical world from pictorial signs. Its authority rests on the impression of chivalric rank more than on a single consistently reconstructed date.

That mixture helps explain both the picture's initial appeal and later doubts. The mounted figure supplies a recognisable centre of command, while the human faces and costumes can seem more fixed than the animals' movements. Ormond criticises that difference, finding the people less convincing as historical actors than the dogs and deer as living forms.^[2] The distinction is visible even without accepting his verdict in full: the animals make contact with one another, whereas several men appear to display a role within the composition.

An open landscape with no secure battlefield

Beyond the crowd, broken ground leads towards distant hills and a wide, clouded sky. The terrain allows the foreground violence to feel exposed rather than enclosed. There is no cottage wall or stable interior to contain the animals, and no city or fortress to explain the historical setting. Instead, receding ground, mountain shapes and moving clouds enlarge the chase into a landscape that can accommodate both sport and the approaching disaster of the ballad.

The eye nevertheless finds several barriers before it can travel freely into that distance. The rearing horse blocks much of the centre; the stag's flank and the leaping hind occupy the right; the armed men close the left. Open sky is easiest to see above their heads, while glimpses of smaller animals on the right suggest that the hunt extends beyond the immediate knot. Landseer builds a wide world and then makes the viewer encounter it through a crowded passage of bodies.

The setting should not be confused with a verified view of the Battle of Otterburn or an exact mapped encounter between Percy and Douglas. Ormond treats the story as an embodiment of recurrent border conflict rather than a reliable record of one particular incident.^[2] The painting itself represents the preceding hunt. Its mountains and atmospheric breadth can evoke the border romance associated with Scott without functioning as evidence that Landseer painted every contour from one identifiable spot.

Two birds cross the upper air, their light shapes separated from the dark bodies below. They make the sky feel habitable and moving rather than a flat backdrop. Their distance also establishes a scale of activity beyond the human company. The hunters organise the ground immediately around the quarry, but the composition does not give them possession of every part of the world it opens above them.

The ballad's hunt and its threatened aftermath

The familiar story survives in more than one form. Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first published in 1765, distinguished an ancient Chevy Chase from a more modern version; later editors continued to print and compare them. The latter tells how Northumberland deliberately pursues deer on land claimed by Douglas. The hunt becomes a challenge to authority, Douglas arrives with armed followers, and the dispute ends in the deaths of both leaders and many of their men.^[2][3]

Landseer's public exhibition text selected the hunting action. Ormond records the 1826 catalogue extract as a combination of lines from two stanzas, directing attention to Percy setting out and to the harts he intended to kill. It was not a continuous stanza lifted intact from the poem.^[2] The selection matters because it gives the apparently self-contained animal struggle a place within a longer narrative. What looks like sporting excitement is also the opening movement of a story about rivalry and loss.

In Percy's later-edited text, the hunters begin before daylight, kill many deer, eat and resume the pursuit; Douglas's arrival interrupts this continuing sport.^[3] Those stages explain the painting's accumulated energy without requiring each figure to be assigned to an exact line. The picture gathers mounted leadership, archery, horns, hounds and quarry into one concentrated scene. It does not attempt to show the whole duration of the hunt or the numerical scale claimed by the ballad.

The text also changes the meaning of weapons. A spear and bow are useful implements within the depicted chase, but readers know that armed confrontation will soon redirect such force towards people. Landseer stops before that reversal. He can therefore show the hunters at the height of their command while allowing their literary future to qualify it. The visual action is immediate; the tragic expectation belongs to the knowledge brought by a reader.

The ballad is not simply a neutral source of picturesque costume. Its ending turns from the leaders' courage and reciprocal admiration towards grief, political retaliation and a wish that destructive disputes between nobles should cease.^[3] A painting of the opening hunt necessarily leaves much of that argument outside the frame. The absent ending does not dictate one moral response to every dog or rider, but it prevents the title from meaning only a pleasant excursion among hills.

The patron changes the deer

The sixth Duke of Bedford did more than pay for the finished image. Letters quoted by Ormond show him discussing the work while it was being made and taking a particular interest in the kind of deer it should contain. The poem described fallow deer, but the duke wanted the more imposing red stag and insisted that the other deer should belong to the same species. His concern joined knowledge of living animals with judgement about what would make a powerful picture.^[2]

This was a consequential alteration. A red stag's scale and antlers give the foreground confrontation a force different from a literal illustration of the ballad's fallow quarry. The duke believed red deer offered finer pictorial subjects and objected to an indiscriminate mixture of species. He therefore favoured coherence within the represented animal world even where that meant departing from the words that had supplied the title. Natural knowledge and textual fidelity were competing considerations rather than automatic allies.

His proposed solution was to change the title as well. The animals could be red deer, he reasoned, but the picture should then be called something other than Chevy Chase. Ormond observes that the final work retained both the red deer and the established title.^[2] The result was not complete obedience to either text or patron. Landseer kept the narrative's recognisable name while adopting the animal forms that would carry his composition most persuasively.

The episode reveals a more practical form of artistic negotiation than a general statement that the painter loved Scotland. The work's subject developed through correspondence, species selection, expectations of historical seriousness and the patron's ambitions for his collection. The duke's own knowledge of deer was substantial; he maintained a notable herd at Woburn. Yet the canvas did not become a zoological demonstration on his behalf. The animal group had to function inside a monumental arrangement whose demands exceeded the accuracy of any single descriptive detail.^[2]

The letters also bear on timing. In July 1825 the duke doubted that the picture could be ready for the next Royal Academy exhibition, but Landseer did complete it for 1826.^[2] The doubt should not be converted into a story of effortless speed or a last-minute miracle. It shows a commission whose scale and complexity could make completion uncertain, even to the patron following its progress closely.

Woburn's ambition and Landseer's earlier hunts

Bedford was forming a collection of contemporary historical pictures and encouraged Landseer to undertake subjects that could stand beside them. Ormond connects that patronage with the painter's choice to work on this scale.^[2] The commission offered animal painting a route into a more elevated setting. Its dogs and deer would not merely decorate a sporting household; they would participate in a collection that asserted the intellectual and imaginative seriousness of modern British art.

Landseer brought an established repertoire to that opportunity. Before his first Scottish visit in 1824, he had already investigated violent encounters involving dogs and larger animals. The earlier Hunting Scene, The Seizure of a Boar and Bull Attacked by Dogs supplied precedents for compressed force and the vulnerability of bodies caught beneath another animal.^[2] Scotland and the ballad changed the scale and historical resonance of these concerns, but did not create them from nothing.

Taking a Buck, exhibited in 1825, forms a more immediate connection. The duke described it in a letter as useful preparation for his own picture. In that composition a man and hounds bring down a buck; Ormond sees it as a prototype for the later hunting group.^[2] The relationship was practical as well as thematic. Landseer could test how human action and animal resistance occupied a large canvas before committing those relationships to a more elaborate literary scene.

Scott's presence supplied another kind of stimulus. Landseer visited him at Abbotsford in 1824, and Ormond associates Chevy Chase with the charged border world of Scott's fiction and poetry.^[2] That connection concerns a cultivated imaginative atmosphere, not a claim that Scott dictated the design or that the ballad was his composition. The picture combines an older narrative, a modern patron's programme, animal studies and the visual authority of earlier painters. Its ambition arose from the convergence of those resources.

Learning from Rubens and Snyders

Flemish hunting painting offered Landseer a language in which animals could sustain monumental action. The comparison concerns more than a general taste for excitement. Large interlocking forms, abruptly changing directions, emphatic diagonals and the alternation of pale bodies with dark masses allow a crowded scene to remain coherent. In Chevy Chase, the hounds' twisting forms guide attention towards the stag even when their individual movements appear chaotic. The design organises violence without making the violence seem orderly to its participants.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art records that, around 1825, Landseer visited Alexander Baring's country house to study Rubens's Wolf and Fox Hunt while preparing The Hunting of Chevy Chase. His surviving copy bears witness to that encounter. The museum connects his interest with the older picture's subject, forceful handling and brilliant light effects.^[15] It is a specific example of looking and copying as preparation, rather than a vague claim that two artists happened to favour the same kinds of animals.

Specific figure sources require more care. Ormond identifies Rubens's Wild Boar Hunt, in a version then associated with the Earl of Darnley's collection, as the model for Percy's horse and the horn-bearing man.^[2] The Met's account establishes the broader preparation through Wolf and Fox Hunt. These statements should not be merged into a single title. They allow for an artist drawing upon a repertoire of related hunting compositions, while leaving the precise ancestry of each figure open to comparison rather than settled by a general resemblance.

Snyders supplies a separate relationship. Ormond associates the leaping hind with his Staghunt, versions of which were known in British collections.^[2] The hind's movement opens the right side of Landseer's canvas: its pale head and raised forelegs lift away from the heavy, downward pressure of the central stag. A borrowed action can therefore do new work in a changed arrangement. Its source matters, but so does the role it acquires beside different animals, figures and landscape.

The colour and surface also contribute to the historical ambition. Ormond admires the lively light and tactile handling of the foreground, connecting them with Rubens's example.^[2] Such an account should not be expanded into an unverified recipe of pigments or layers. The important effect is available to ordinary looking: small bright accents make armour, fur and flesh respond differently, while the larger dark and pale areas hold the crowd together. The painting claims a place in a prestigious tradition by adapting its means to a young British artist's animal knowledge.

Studies that solve different problems

The preparatory material was not all of one kind. A small oil sketch could test the entire arrangement, while a drawing of an animal group could concentrate on a difficult contact between head, mouth and body. Ormond catalogues a colour study for the finished picture as no. 25, measuring about 45.8 by 61 centimetres on panel.^[2] Its compressed scale allowed the artist to see the whole mass of riders and animals together before translating it into the larger canvas.

The sketch also has a history independent of the finished painting. Sotheby's offered it in 2015, identifying it with a work sold from Landseer's studio in May 1874 and acquired through Agnew for Charles William Mansel Lewis, after which it descended in that family.^[16] This record should not be confused with the Bedford sale of the Birmingham canvas in 1951, or with the separate battle sketch. Similar titles and related compositions make such distinctions essential: ownership of a study does not travel automatically with ownership of the picture it helped prepare.

A further witness survives in the Courtauld collection. Its Studies of a staghound and the head of a stag for painting ‘The Hunting of Chevy Chase’, dated 1825–26, is accession D.1952.RW.3576 and measures 42.8 by 53.1 centimetres. The museum describes black chalk and brown wash with traces of white bodycolour on white-grounded canvas, an irregular upper edge, an oval formed by darkened margins and a paper support.^[17] The unusual material description prevents this object from being treated casually as a pencil drawing on an untouched sheet.

The Courtauld also retains a question mark over the substance used for the brown outer margins. That small uncertainty is worth preserving because it distinguishes a museum's description of a complex surviving object from a confident reconstruction of every studio procedure. The study's catalogued relationship to Chevy Chase is informative; it does not supply a complete sequence of decisions or prove that its every mark transferred directly into the final canvas.^[17]

Together, the studies show how a crowded picture can be approached at different levels. One object organises the whole, another isolates animal forms, and the finished painting must make those forms serve both narrative and large-scale design. The process cannot be reduced to spontaneous dexterity. Landseer's celebrated ease depended here on the coordination of smaller investigations whose purposes were related but not identical.

The battle that remained a sketch

Landseer explored a second composition, The Battle of Chevy Chase, which Ormond catalogues separately as no. 27. The oil-on-panel sketch suggests a possible sequel to the hunt, but no completed large companion is known. Its subject is the aftermath of human conflict, with the dead, mourners and animals gathered into a scene of grief. Ormond connects it with the ballad's closing account of widows coming to recover their husbands.^[2]

The two subjects establish a strong opposition. In the hunt, weapons are raised, horses rear and the men still possess the energy of command. In the battle's aftermath, movement gives way to the task of tending and carrying bodies. The change of emphasis could have made the consequence of aristocratic rivalry explicit across a pair of pictures. As it stands, the surviving sketch records an intention or possibility; it cannot be treated as the second half of a completed commission.

The identities within the sequel are also uncertain. Ormond does not securely identify the dead principal knight as either Douglas or Northumberland.^[2] That caution matters because the two men die differently in the poem, and a confidently named corpse would encourage a more exact historical account than the image supports. The Birmingham hunt is more readily tied to Percy's expedition, but even there an identification supplied by literary context differs from a portrait of a documented participant.

The proposed sequel sharpens the choice embodied in the finished work. Landseer knew that the story continued beyond the animals' struggle and considered painting that later stage. The canvas he completed nevertheless concentrates on the living action of the hunt. Its historical significance therefore depends partly on anticipation: the viewer can sense the possibility of human catastrophe without being shown its completed result in the same object.

What the first critics believed they saw

The Royal Academy exhibited The Hunting of Chevy Chase as no. 292 in 1826. Reviewing it in The Examiner on 21 May, a critic signing R. H. treated it as evidence that Landseer was approaching the rank of a history painter. The writer acknowledged that a deer hunt was not strictly a historical subject, then argued that the faces, exertions and motives of the hunters raised it beyond an ordinary animal scene.^[2][4]

This was a claim about what painting could do with a subject, rather than simply about the antiquity of its story. For the reviewer, the hunters were convincing because their forms and expressions gave energy to the action. The animals supplied a different but complementary achievement: the final encounter between stag and hounds combined the anatomical authority associated with Snyders with the animation associated with Rubens. The critic's high praise depended on seeing those qualities work together in a modern picture.^[4]

The review also made the work exemplary for other artists. It recommended that animal and historical painters study the principles behind its success. That recommendation is more revealing than a bare statement that the painting was popular. It places Chevy Chase within a debate about artistic rank, suggesting that an animal painter might teach colleagues working in genres conventionally treated as more elevated. The foreground dogs were not an embarrassment to the claim of seriousness; their convincing action helped make it possible.^[4]

At the British Institution in February 1827, the picture appeared as no. 36 and received renewed praise in The Examiner, again under the initials R. H. The writer emphasised vigour in both people and animals, repeating the comparisons with Snyders and Rubens while insisting that the action served its purpose rather than displaying empty pretension.^[5] The second notice belongs to another exhibition a year later. It is evidence of sustained critical advocacy, not a second date of execution.

These responses also illuminate the duke's role. The first review praised Bedford as a patron of artistic achievement and associated his commission with a public ideal of cultural encouragement.^[4] A privately owned painting was being judged as a contribution to national art. The work's appearance in a London exhibition allowed the ambition of a country-house collection and the reputation of a young painter to reinforce one another before a wider audience.

Why later judgement became less certain

Later criticism did not preserve that early verdict intact. Ormond cites Gustav Friedrich Waagen's objection that the attitudes were exaggerated and less truthful than Landseer's usual work. He also records the adverse judgements of Cosmo Monkhouse and James Manson.^[2] These are historically different responses to the same canvas, and they cannot be averaged into an uncomplicated story of universal admiration followed by universal neglect.

The fault line runs through qualities that the early reviewer had praised. A lifted arm can convey force or appear theatrical; a crowded group can seem richly animated or overextended; historical costume can establish rank or expose the weakness of a stock figure. The painting asks its human actors to match the animals' intensity, so any disparity between them becomes conspicuous. Later viewers could continue to admire the dogs and deer while doubting whether the surrounding history justified the scale of the performance.

Ormond's own account recognises that unevenness without dismissing the work's animal design or handling.^[2] The canvas is strongest when the forms depend physically on one another: the stag bends into the dogs, a hound twists beneath pressure, the horse's movement unsettles the rider's authority. The more an attendant functions as a sign of medieval life rather than as a body caught in that system of forces, the more vulnerable the historical illusion becomes. The difference is a productive way to understand disagreement about the work, rather than a reason to erase either period's response.

From the Bedford collection to Birmingham

The finished canvas remained with the Bedford collection until its sale at Christie's on 19 January 1951, where Ormond records it as lot 186, purchased by the National Art-Collections Fund and presented to Birmingham in 1952.^[2] The 2019 exhibition checklist uses the acquisition wording “Purchased with Art Fund support, 1952”.^[1] These accounts emphasise different points within the transfer: the 1951 sale and supporting purchase, and the painting's 1952 entry into the museum collection.

That sequence corrects the compressed statement that Birmingham simply acquired the painting in 1951. It also explains why the accession number begins with 1952 without requiring the auction to have taken place in that year. A sale date, funding date, presentation and accession can form stages of one movement between collections. The object's present identity does not become clearer by forcing those stages into a single undifferentiated event.

The institutional change altered its setting of reception. At Woburn, the canvas belonged to a patron's programme of contemporary historical painting and to the wider material culture of an aristocratic house. In Birmingham, it could be examined as part of a public collection, compared with other works and lent for exhibitions concerned with British art. Ormond lists twentieth-century showings in London and Paris, while the Nevada checklist documents its later inclusion in the travelling Victorian Radicals exhibition.^[1][2]

None of these appearances guarantees that the picture is permanently displayed in a particular room. They establish a history of public circulation and changing interpretation. The object that began as Bedford's ambitious commission has acquired audiences who do not share the patron's sporting culture or the first reviewer's expectations of national history painting. Its scale, crowded surface and violent animal encounter can consequently become questions in their own right, rather than evidence of a social world taken for granted.

The image in print

The picture also reached viewers through engraving. Ormond records an etching by Charles George Lewis in 1835 and a later Lewis reproduction for the Art-Journal in 1876.^[2] These are publications after the painting, not separate versions by Edwin or an automatic contribution by his brother Thomas. Keeping the maker and date visible gives the reproductive image its own place in the work's history.

Print changes the balance of the composition. In the coloured canvas, white hounds, red-brown deer, dark horse, bright armour and blue sky separate the interwoven forms. A monochrome translation has to establish those relations through engraved tone, line and contrast. The central knot remains recognisable, but the means by which a spectator distinguishes one body from another are transformed. The image's circulation depended on another artist solving the problem again in a different material.

The existence of more than one publication does not reveal a total number of impressions or prove that every nineteenth-century household knew the work. It does show that the composition had a life beyond its successive exhibition walls. Viewers could encounter the hunt as an image on paper, with a title directing them towards a familiar ballad even when they had never seen Bedford's canvas. The relation between story and visible action thus remained important as the work changed scale and setting.

Who carries the history?

The picture distributes its claims unevenly, and that unevenness is part of its interest. Percy has armour, a horse, attendants and the name of a famous ballad. The dogs and deer have the more immediate evidence of bodies exerting and receiving force. The human hierarchy explains why the hunt has been organised; the animal group makes its consequences present to the spectator. Landseer needs both, even when one convinces more readily than the other.

Bedford's intervention over the deer makes that relationship especially clear. The literary text named one kind of quarry, the patron preferred another, and the final canvas retained the recognised story while changing its animal substance.^[2][3] The painting was never merely a transparent window onto a medieval event. It was a modern construction in which knowledge of animals, aristocratic collecting, inherited verse and Flemish pictorial example were brought into argument with one another.

The unwritten future of the finished scene gives that construction its final pressure. The men appear able to direct every weapon towards the quarry, but the ballad will turn their confidence into mutual destruction. Landseer leaves that reversal outside the frame and invests his completed picture in the struggle before it. History is announced by the riders, yet felt first in the animals beneath them: their movement gives the spectacle a seriousness that costume and title alone could never secure.