Monarch of the Glen

Kit: Last weekend I went to  a viewing of Wes Anderson's film, Moonrise Kingdom, which was full of period detail, pretty much in sync with my own childhood. In the scoutmaster's (Ed Norton) tent hangs a painting of a stag in the wilderness.
There was always a copy of the same painting in my grandfather's house. It has a hole which we decided was the gunshot that killed the stag so he could be put in a painting. My grandfather's came with him from Maine and was probably painted between 1860-1880. It is a terrible, but charming copy. I was curious to find the original that had spawned an apparent Victorian repro business and dropped the image into google image search. Up popped the Landseer original, whose fate appears to be to have been made for appropriation. It was wonderful to discover the Peter Blake take on it, then Peter Saville's version of Blake's version of Landseer's original.
I have my Monarch close to me in my London studio. As an epilogue, this morning I walked past one of my favourite buildings on Giltspur Street, just near St Barts. Over the door is a huge stag's head, very similar to the Landseer… I had never realised why that building gave me so much pleasure until now- a cross Atlantic palimpsest of the best kind.

Original: Monarch of the Glen 1851, Edwin Landseer

Giltspur Street stag