Head of a Roebuck and Two Ptarmigan

Edwin Henry Landseer · c. 1830

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

22.5 × 30.4 cm (8 7/8 × 12 in.); Framed: 37.5 × 45.5 × 7.7 cm (14 3/4 × 17 7/8 × 3 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Landseer's intimate study places a roebuck's head alongside two ptarmigan with the quiet authority of an artist who understood animal life from the inside out. Edwin Henry Landseer was the defining animal painter of nineteenth-century Britain, renowned for the psychological depth he brought to wildlife subjects that lesser painters reduced to trophy studies. Painted around 1830, this panel-format work demonstrates his early command of texture — the roebuck's coarse neck fur rendered with the same careful attention as the ptarmigan's mottled plumage. Working on panel rather than canvas allowed him tighter control over fine detail, and the result reads less as a hunting record than as an act of close observation. Landseer was famously ambidextrous and would sometimes draw different subjects simultaneously with each hand, a party trick that impressed Queen Victoria, who became one of his most devoted patrons and took lessons from him herself. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made by a skilled artist working directly from the original, matching the warm, restrained palette and the delicate layering of paint that gives Landseer's surfaces their characteristic depth — a faithful companion to one of the Art Institute of Chicago's quieter but rewarding works.