Our study of about 1825 is close to Landseer’s finished Royal Academy Diploma picture of 1830, The Faithful Hound (RA), in which the hound and the knight are the other way around. The subject is from the anonymous fifteenth-century Ballad of Chevy Chase, in which an English hunting party in the Cheviot Hills in the Borders is mistaken for an invading war party by the Scots, and a bloody fight ensues. Sir Walter Scott published the ballad in his Border Minstrelsy of 1802-3. Edward Bird painted the subject in 1824, and sent his picture to Scott at Abbotsford, where Landseer saw it when he visited that same year. In other diverse treatments of the subject (he painted three) Landseer may also have been influenced by Delacroix’s huge Massacre at Chios [the Turks of the Greeks] which caused a sensation in the Paris Salon in 1824.

This sketch, with its powerful subject and wonderfully confident painterly marks, reminds us that Landseer could lay claim to having been a great Romantic painter, despite later becoming famous for animals. In Graves’s Catalogue of Landseer, our picture is no 161, A sketch of the Dead Warrior (1830), which had been ‘exhibited at the Marylebone Institute in 1859 by Jacob Bell Esq and now belongs to Mrs Spencer Bell’. In the catalogue to that exhibition at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution, it was described by Bell, (the Institution’s President): ‘This sketch represents, with a few strokes of the brush, the body of a warrior on a moor, tracked by his bloodhound. The expression an[d] tone of colour are surprising.’ ‘Most of Sir Edwin’s smaller works in this exhibition are simply sketches …’ observed the Weekly Chronicle. The picture was not part of Bell’s bequest to the National Gallery in 1859, which included seven finished paintings by Landseer, nor is it in Mrs Spencer Bell’s sale at Christie’s in 1893. We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in cataloguing this picture.