Mountainous Landscape with Oxen panicking whilst drawing a Cart

Painted in 1807 and held by the National Trust, this canvas depicts a dramatic moment of animal panic — oxen bolting on a mountain track — combined with the grandeur of alpine landscape. The subject integrates the Neoclassical landscape tradition's interest in nature's power with an observation from working rural life: the unpredictable behaviour of working animals under stress. Valenciennes's theoretical writing addressed the depiction of animals and their relationship to landscape, arguing that animal subjects enlivened scenes without reducing them to the anecdotal. The panicking oxen introduce a moment of violent movement into what would otherwise be a static landscape, testing the painter's ability to capture motion within a composed format. The National Trust's holding places the work alongside British landscape traditions with which it has interesting parallels, particularly in its treatment of working animals in mountainous terrain.

The diagonal thrust of the panicking oxen and overturned cart creates strong movement across a composition that the mountain landscape stabilises vertically. Valenciennes used rough, energetic brushwork in the animal figures — quite different from his usual landscape handling — to convey the sudden, uncontrolled nature of the panic.