Sir Edwin Landseer’s Scene in Braemar, a nearly nine-foot canvas long understood as a darker sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen, will be offered in Sotheby’s Old Master Evening Sale in London with an estimate of £3 million to £4 million, poised to set a new auction record for the artist. Painted by 1857 and unseen in public for over two decades, it is the culmination of Landseer’s lifelong fascination with the Highland stag.
Widely admired as among “the best works of the artist” when first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, the painting distils everything Landseer, often dubbed the “ King of animal painters”, loved about the untamed beauty of the Highlands. At its centre a huge, weathered stag stands defiantly on a rocky peak, roaring at an unseen challenger; a hind nestles in the heather below, a mountain hare emerges among the rocks, and beyond, another hind and young stag look upward as an eagle carries prey through the air.
The painting represents the culmination of an idea that had occupied Landseer for more than thirty years. His earliest deer subjects were rooted in sporting art, but by the late 1830s and 1840s his Highland pictures had become darker and more symbolic. Painted almost a decade after The Monarch of the Glen, Scene in Braemar brings that evolution to its fullest expression. The title locates the scene at Braemar in the eastern Highlands, close to Mar Lodge, where Landseer frequently stayed while stalking in the Deeside forests, near Balmoral, the royal residence of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, among his most important patrons. He first visited the Highlands in 1824, aged just 22, and returned almost every autumn thereafter.
Scene in Braemar was commissioned by Edward Ladd Betts, the railway magnate and civil engineering contractor, for Preston Hall in Kent, where it hung high on the dining room wall as the centrepiece of his collection of modern British pictures. When Betts’s collection was sold at Christie’s in 1868, following the financial crisis that badly affected railway fortunes, the painting achieved 4,000 guineas, by far the highest price in the sale. It was acquired through Agnew’s for Henry William Ferdinand Bolckow, the industrialist and first Mayor of Middlesbrough.
When the painting appeared in the pre-sale exhibition for the Bolckow collection at Christie’s in 1888, Beatrix Potter visited the view and described the display in her journal as “splendid”, singling out Braemar as “one of the leading pictures”. It was then acquired through Agnew’s for Sir Edward Cecil Guinness, later 1st Earl of Iveagh, and remained in the Guinness family until 1994.
Scene in Braemar will be on view in Sotheby’s London galleries from 27 June, ahead of the Old Master Evening Sale on 1 July 2026.
(Press Release)
