Morning, c. 1853
Oil on canvas
Sir Edwin Landseer’s epic scenes of combat between stags in the Scottish Highlands were extremely familiar to his contemporaries—they were certainly known to Darwin. The stags in this picture were described in verse as 'mighty heroes of the mountainside.' They symbolised the competitive struggle not only between animals but between humans, and its often tragic outcomes. In a companion painting, Night, the stags fight relentlessly through a storm. In Morning, shown here, both lie dead, their antlers fatally entangled. The brightness of the day and the approaching scavengers—a fox and an eagle—typify the heartlessness of nature. In fact, a writer of 1879 saw Night and Morning as powerful expressions of the idea of natural selection, even though they were painted before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection, in Memory of Frances R. McIlhenny, 1986