In this heroic landscape Landseer gives full rein to that feeling for the 'sublime' which characterises his later work. Deer and the Scottish Highlands were invariably the vehicle for these aspirations. He had discovered the Highlands in 1824 when, as a prodigiously talented young artist of twenty-one, he visited Scotland for the first time and stayed with Sir Walter Scott. This immediately inspired him to paint the first of the deer subjects for which he was to become so famous, but those of the 1820s are essentially sporting pictures, even if, like The Hunting of Chevy Chase of 1825-6 (Birmingham), they have a literary dimension. He painted few deer subjects in the 1830s, being preoccupied with other types of commissions; but in 1842 he produced The Sanctuary, in which a stag is seen wading into Loch Maree to escape its pursuers, the sun setting symbolically in the distance. The picture was bought by Queen Victoria as a birthday present for Prince Albert, both of them being passionate devotees of the Highlands, in common with so many of their subjects. It was the total sympathy between monarch and artist on the subject of Scotland that underpinned Landseer's close connection with the Royal Family, the source of so much of the authority that he commanded in his day.

As Richard Ormond points out in the catalogue of the Landseer Exhibition of 1981-2, The Sanctuary marks a turning-point in Landseer's painting of deer. From now on they take on an almost visionary intensity, the stag becoming (in Ormond's words), a 'symbol of the powerful and tragic forces of nature, noble but inevitably doomed.' The human presence, so dominant in the early 'sporting' subjects is almost totally removed, and the deer in their majestic setting become an image of grandeur and pathos in themselves. In all these paintings they are shown at moments of climax, sensing danger, issuing challenges to rivals, at bay, fighting to the death, or lying dead or wounded in the snow. Perhaps the most characteristic, in the sense that they show stags both in their most heroic and their most vulnerable, are those in which they rear their heads in anticipation of danger or roar in challenge. The most celebrated example is The Monarch of the Glen (John Dewar & Sons), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, although in some ways the enormous Scene in Braemar of 1857, sold in Christie's London on March 25, 1994, achieves a greater intensity with its more sublime and awesome setting.
The mood of introspection found in Landseer's later deer pictures can be partly attributed to the severe nervous breakdown which he suffered in May 1840. He was never to recover his old equanimity, becoming a lifelong prey to depression, hyprochondria and alcoholism. This had no effect on his executive ability, which remained unimpaired to the end, but it did introduce an increasingly neurotic element into his paintings, culminating in such late works as Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864: Royal Holloway College), the violent Swannery invaded by Eagles (1860: private collection), and to semi-mystical canvases the Baptismal Font (Royal Collection) and The Lion and the Lamb (Johannesburg Art Gallery) which he painted in 1872, a year before his death.

In his later works, like many artists towards the end of their lives, Landseer seems to enter a private world of his own. He is painting essentially for himself, probing the depths of his own psyche rather than seeking to communicate. Paradoxically, this in no way lessened the pictures' ability to speak to a wide audience. Just as his anthropomorphic dogs appealed to the Victorians' incorrigible sentimentality, so these heroic images of deer reflected their romanticism in terms of one of its most potent symbols, the untamed freedom of the Scottish Highlands. True, following the 'clearances', the image was partly an illusion but to most visitors this would not have been apparent. At a deeper level, too, these pictures appealed, answering to the spiritual perplexities of the age. They may have been painted essentially for the artist himself, but their latent betrayal of mental tribulation struck many an answering chord at a time when questions about the nature and meaning of existence were the subject of anxious debate.

In The Deer Pass, exhibited at the British Institution in 1852, a year after The Monarch of the Glen, five before Scene in Braemar, the emphasis is firmly on the bleak Highland landscape, which dwarfs the foreground deer. In fact the dominance of the landscape seems originally to have been even more pronounced, since according to Algernon Graves (loc. cit.), 'this subject was at first without the group of deer in the foreground, which was afterwards inserted at the request of Mr. Henry Graves, to make it a more engravable subject. The stag close to the rock was the only animal in the picture.' It is natural to assume that the addition was made in 1855, when the picture was engraved by Thomas Landseer, who reproduced so many of his younger brother's works, and indeed the Art Journal, reviewing the 1852 exhibition, seems to confirm Graves's statement: 'a stag, with ample antlers,...looks out of the picture, and challenges the spectator...he is after all but a trifle - a suggestion of life in the "pass".' Curiously enough, however other reviews of the 1852 exhibition suggest that the additional deer were in place by then. The art-critic of the Illustrated London News referred to 'a group of deer perched on a perilous pinnacle overhanging a yawning abyss...The animals in their treatment exhibit all the characteristic intelligence and truthfulness of surface which we expect from this accompished hand.' Similarly in the Athenaeum: 'the animals...are designed with the painter's accustomed supremacy.'

Whatever the explanation, press comment was generally favourable. There were a few cavils about the picture's 'incompleteness', but the Art Journal throught 'everywhere masterly', and no-one doubted that (to quote the Anthenaeum again) it was 'grandly suggestive of the rugged haunts of the stately creature from whom it borrows its name.'