Monarch of the Glen sister painting sells for £5.9m at auction

A little known sister painting of the iconic Monarch of the Glen has sold for £5.9m at auction in London.

Scene in Braemar, by Queen Victoria's favourite artist Sir Edwin Landseer, fetched five times the previous record for one of his works.

Featuring a 12-point stag on a Scottish Highland peak, it was commissioned by railway magnate Edward Betts and has passed through various private collections.

Sotheby's had estimated it would sell for up to £4m.

Monarch of the Glen, which hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland, is one of the most recognisable and reproduced paintings in British art.

Although lesser known, Scene in Braemar is much larger at almost 9ft (2.74m).

The painting's last appearance at auction was in 1994 when it sold for £793,500. It fetched £5,946,000 in this latest sale.

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.