Copy after Rubens's "Wolf and Fox Hunt"

Landseer produced this copy after Rubens's monumental Wolf and Fox Hunt in 1824, when he was just twenty-two years old and already regarded as a prodigy. The exercise was a deliberate act of self-education: copying Old Masters was the standard method by which young painters absorbed compositional strategies and painterly technique. Rubens's Wolf and Fox Hunt, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a tour de force of swirling animal energy and complex figure groups. For Landseer, who specialised in animal subjects, it was the ideal model — a demonstration of how the human body, horse, hound, and quarry could be woven into a single explosive whole. That Landseer's copy now resides in the same Metropolitan Museum as the original creates an instructive dialogue between source and response. The painting reveals the young artist's ambition to ground his genre in the highest tradition of European hunting-scene painting rather than in the more modest sporting prints that dominated English art.

Painted on panel, the work deploys energetic, directional brushwork to capture the kinetic tension of the original. Landseer closely studies Rubens's deployment of diagonal thrusts and counter-thrusts across the picture plane. Colour is kept broadly faithful to the source, though Landseer's handling retains its own identity in the treatment of animal fur.