A twelve-point stag stands in mist on a Highland hillside and turns its head. It is probably the most reproduced image ever made in Scotland, it was painted by an Englishman, the animal never existed, and the picture was originally refused by the people who commissioned it.
The commission that fell through
In 1850 Edwin Landseer was asked to paint three pictures for the refreshment rooms of the House of Lords. The Monarch of the Glen was one of them. He finished it in 1851, it was shown at the Royal Academy that year, and then the House of Commons declined to vote the money to pay for it.
So the greatest piece of Highland iconography ever produced was turned down by Parliament and sold into private hands instead. It stayed there, changing owners, for over a century.
The stag is not a real stag
Landseer knew red deer better than almost any painter alive. He had been going to the Highlands since the 1820s, staying at Glen Feshie with the Duchess of Bedford, sketching stalks and carcasses and living animals for decades.
He did not paint a portrait of one. The Monarch is a composite — the antlers, the chest, the set of the head assembled from everything a Highland stag was supposed to be. That is precisely why the image works as an emblem and why no photograph has ever replaced it. It is not a deer. It is the idea of a deer, painted with the technical seriousness of a state portrait.
How it got everywhere
The picture became a commercial property early and never stopped. It sold whisky for Dewar's and later for Glenfiddich. It sold marmalade for Hartley's. It sold soup, shortbread, insurance and tea. By the middle of the twentieth century the painting and the products had become so entangled that people who could describe the image in detail had no idea it was a painting at all, let alone a Victorian one.
Critical opinion turned against it accordingly. For most of the twentieth century The Monarch of the Glen was the standard example of everything wrong with Victorian sentiment: kitsch, imperial, a tourist-board Scotland invented for people who did not live there.
Some of that criticism is fair. It is worth noticing that it is also an argument about advertising rather than about paint.
2017
In 2016 Diageo, which had acquired the painting through the drinks business, put it up for sale. The National Galleries of Scotland were given the chance to buy it for £4 million — half its valuation — and launched a public appeal to raise the balance.
They got it. The picture that Parliament refused to pay for in 1851 was bought for the nation in 2017 by public subscription, and it now hangs in the Scottish National Gallery on Princes Street, a few hundred yards from where the Highland tourist trade sells reproductions of it.
Landseer himself
He was a prodigy who exhibited at the Royal Academy at thirteen and a celebrity by his twenties, the highest-paid animal painter in Britain and a favourite of Queen Victoria, who had him paint her dogs and her Highland servants. He modelled the bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's Column.
He also suffered repeated breakdowns, drank heavily, and was declared of unsound mind in the last year of his life. He died in 1873. The shops in Trafalgar Square closed on the day of his funeral.
What to hang
It is a landscape-format picture and it needs room — the mist above the stag's head is half the composition, and cropping it or hanging it small throws the whole thing away. At 60 × 90 cm above a fireplace it does exactly what it was built to do.
If you want the same subject without the freight, Landseer's Scene in Braemar and his ptarmigan studies are the working pictures behind the icon — quieter, closer to observation, and much less often seen.
See the stags and Scottish wildlife collection — archival prints, framed or unframed, made to order and shipped free worldwide.