Julian Gascoigne, senior director in Sotheby’s paintings department, said it was one of Landseer’s great Highland masterpieces.
He described it as an atmospheric sister painting of the Monarch of the Glen.
Gascoigne said: “Where the Monarch shows the stag in the brilliance of youth, this is a darker, more epic vision: majestic, charged with tension, and iconic in its vision of the Highlands.”
In 1857, The Times praised it as “masterly in conception and effect” and a worthy partner to Monarch of the Glen.
Edward Betts originally paid £800 for the work, but a banking crisis forced the industrialist to sell the work along with the rest of his collection in 1868.
The painting has been exhibited in public galleries on a number of occasions since.
