The preeminent painter of animals, George Stubbs elevated what had been the mundane recording of the sports and amusements of the English aristocracy and country gentry to a new artistic and expressive level. The subject of this canvas derives from the grand seventeenth-century hunt paintings of Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, and prefigures the more emotional themes explored in the nineteenth century by Sir Edwin Landseer. The image itself is horrific: the dog, after a long and exhausting pursuit, has finally succeeded in attaching himself to the stag; the beast, eyes bulging in terror, flings his stately antlers toward his pursuer. Yet what in the nineteenth century would become a dark and moralistic drama is here played out with balletic elegance and complete detachment, the principals placed against a panoramic landscape bathed in a gentle, blond light. Man seems far distant, and something more cosmic and eternal than mere sport is afoot. Joseph J. Rishel, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 181.