LONDON.- Monumental in scale and charged with the drama of the Scottish Highlands, Sir Edwin Landseer’s Scene in Braemar is the culmination of the artist's lifelong fascination with the Highland stag. Painted by 1857, the nearly nine-foot canvas has long been understood as a darker and more mysterious sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen - Landseer’s iconic image of the Highland stag, and one of the most recognisable symbols of British art. Unseen in public for over two decades, this summer, Scene in Braemar will be offered in Sotheby’s Old Master Evening Sale in London with an estimate of £3 - 4 million, poised to set a new auction record for the artist.

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Widely admired as among “the best works of the artist” when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, Scene in Braemar has remained one of the most celebrated compositions by Landseer, often dubbed the “King of animal painters”. The painting distils everything he loved about the untamed beauty of the Highlands.

At the centre of the picture is a huge stag standing defiantly on a rocky Highland peak, roaring at an unseen challenger. This is not the sleek stag of The Monarch of the Glen, but a more weathered, fully mature animal - thick-maned, massive in body and charged with an almost heroic presence. Wreathed in mist and silhouetted against the Scottish landscape, he dominates a scene alive with tension: a hind nestles in the sparse heather below, a mountain hare emerges among the rocks, and, beyond, another hind and young stag look upwards 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, filtered through the Romantic imagination; but by the late 1830s and 1840s, however, his Highland pictures had become darker, more symbolic and more visionary. Painted almost a decade after The Monarch of the Glen, Scene in Braemar brings that evolution to its fullest expression, transforming the Highland stag into an image of power, solitude and sublime mystery.





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. This was the part of Scotland he knew most intimately - near Blair Atholl, another of his regular haunts, and Balmoral, the royal residence built for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, among his most important patrons. Landseer first visited the Highlands in 1824, aged just 22, and returned almost every autumn thereafter; from that moment, Scotland became central to his artistic imagination.

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 wall of the dining room as the dramatic centrepiece of his collection of modern British pictures. That elevated setting may explain the painting’s commanding viewpoint, which heightens the scale of the animals and gives the whole composition its striking sense of grandeur.

When Betts’s collection was sold at Christie’s in 1868, following the financial crisis that badly affected railway fortunes, Scene in Braemar 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, collector, first Mayor of Middlesbrough and later the town’s first Member of Parliament, in whose collection it became one of the leading pictures.

Its reputation continued into the later nineteenth century. 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”. The painting was acquired through Agnew’s for Sir Edward Cecil Guinness, later 1st Earl of Iveagh, one of the great collectors of British art of the period and remained in the Guinness family until 1994.

Scene in Braemar will be on view in Sotheby’s London galleries from 27th June, ahead of the Old Master Evening Sale on 1 July 2026.