Landseer described Queen Victoria as a ‘very inconvenient little treasure’; the Queen described the artist in similar terms. Their relationship was close, fruitful and fraught; Landseer was inspired in fits and starts; the Queen enthusiastic but also meddlesome and as concerned with the banality of a likeness as with the brilliance of an artistic idea.

This work is an oil sketch for an ambitious equestrian portrait which failed to materialise after thirty years of trying and as many false starts. Whatever the subsequent fate of the project, this is a near perfect oil sketch conveying a brilliant compositional idea. Taking his cue from Van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles I with M. de St Antoine (Royal Collection) Landseer has shown the Queen riding through an triumphal arch, just indicated by rounding the two upper corners inside the frame, on Leopold, her favourite horse, accompanied by Hector (a deerhound), Dash (a King Charles Spaniel) and a bloodhound, and followed by a troop of lancers. The Queen is dressed in medieval costume which chimes with the castle behind an idealised version of Windsor Castle (as remodelled by Jeffry Wyatville in previous decades). This is a châtelaine of romance with her loyal retainers.

The reference to Van Dyck’s portrait draws attention to the distinctive pose of mount and rider in Landseer’s work, for Leopold, an old half-blind horse, is shying, implying equestrian diffidence, giving a graceful curve to its body and demonstrating the Queen’s fine side-saddle horsemanship. Like her horse the Queen looks modestly down. This is not a swaggering King on a charger, but a modest, almost reluctant Queen.

This rapidly executed piece is reminiscent of Rubens’s oil-sketches. The thinness of the paint, the very light, off-white priming and the extraordinarily summary way in which some of the shapes are blocked also resembles watercolour technique. A close parallel in subject and technique is provided by the flickering watercolour scenes of romanticised history by Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28), an exact contemporary of Landseer’s.

Inscribed on the back with names of the artist and sitter.

Text adapted from 'The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life', London, 2009