This magnificent image of animal terror, set in a dramatic and forbidding rocky landscape, was one of Stubbs’s favourite subjects. It seized the imagination of his contemporaries and this and other versions of the theme became popular as prints. Nothing similar had previously appeared in British art yet it exploited a growing taste in the 1760s for the Sublime: subjects which created a sense of oppression and terror and which were experienced purely as emotion, not rationalised. Stubbs’s source for the subject was a well-known antique sculpture, which he had probably noted on a trip to Rome in 1754.