Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia

Aeneas's son Ascanius shoots a stag that is the house-reared pet of Silvia, daughter of "Tyrrheus, chief ranger to the Latian king" (John Dryden's translation), provoking a war with Latium for the future site of Rome.

On the face of it this, in a scene from before the founding of Rome, is an anachronism that would have been apparent even in the 17th century, but it reflects the state to which ancient Roman monuments were reduced in Claude's own time.

This is also a late work, but the composition could hardly be more different; here Sylvia nurses the dying stag as a female companion keeps the hounds off it, and fighting has broken out behind them between the Latins and Ascanius' party.

A scene closer to the Rubens, with the wounded stag finding Silvia, is in the Vergilius Vaticanus of about 400; curiously, this is the point where the two Late antique Virgil cycles of illustration come closest to matching.

[11] As in the pendant in Hamburg, and many paintings by Claude, the composition draws the viewer's gaze into the background by having two large repoussoir elements at each side, where one is very close at hand, and the other set much further back.

According to his other contemporary biographer Joachim von Sandrart he had made considerable efforts to improve them, but without success; certainly there are numerous studies, typically for groups of figures, among his drawings.

With the mid-20th century fashion for medical diagnosis through art, it was suggested that Claude had developed an optical condition producing such effects, but this has been rejected by doctors and critics alike.

The range of colour is reduced to its utmost limits: silvery green trees, pale grey-blue sky, grey architecture, and neutral-coloured dresses for the figures.

Along with many other top paintings from Roman collections, it was bought by the English collector, dealer, writer, and curator William Young Ottley.

It remained in the Baring family collection until the 2nd Earl of Northbrook sold it at Christie's in 1919 for £588; by this time prices for Claudes had plunged, allowing for inflation.