Stag party
Powhatan’s Mantle and Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen are two iconic depictions of deer separated by more than 200 years and two very different cultures. In her book The Age of Deer, Erika Howsare explores how the animal has remained a potent symbol to thi
As long as humans have been making art, deer have been part of it. They’re one of the most frequently depicted animals in Europe’s largest cave galleries, like Lascaux and Altamira. Even Neanderthals, it seems, made deer into art: in 2021, in northern Germany, researchers discovered a 51,000-year-old fragment of bone from a giant deer – in that time and place, a rare beast – skillfully carved with a pattern of interlocking chevrons.
That bone wasn’t chosen just because it was a handy material; it probably carried heavy symbolic freight, as deer have through the ages. Some of the oldest-known deliberate human burials in the world include the bones of deer – adorning human remains, or forming roofs in tombs. It all seems to echo the way, in many world myths and legends, deer serve as psychopomps: guides for the newly deceased.
Hunting is the key to this mysterious connection. Deer have been major providers for humans for millennia, giving us meat, hides, and other essentials – so we’ve seen them as animals we must kill in order to live. We love them and long for them, but we cause their deaths. It all makes for a complex dilemma, a moral and mortal stew. In our creative lives, we’ve approached that paradox over and over again – picturing antlered deities, half-human, half-deer, or weaving stories about humans who shapeshift into deer and back again. The Greek hunting goddess Artemis (Diana to the Romans) was often shown alongside a sacred hind, her familiar – as was, sometimes, St Patrick. These images speak to a kind of kinship that can never be fully unpacked.
Like everything else, though, our relationship to deer changed in the modern world. We’ve left behind the idea that deer are fellow-travellers with whom we share a sacred bond, and we’ve begun to see them as objects. They’ve turned into resources, pests, victims of human activity, and the targets of conservation efforts, all at once. And they’re still quarry to be hunted, though the culture of the hunt has transformed. Two famous pieces of deer art illustrate clearly how far we’ve travelled since those Lascaux days.
The first comes from the Powhatan nation, a Native American group indigenous to a coastal territory near where I live in Virginia. These were the people who encountered the English ships that landed in 1607, disgorging the settlers of the Jamestown colony. The Powhatans, like other Native groups, had an intimate dependence on deer: venison and deer hides were staples, and hunting was usually communal.
Deer furnished exalted items too. Powhatan’s Mantle is a 400-year-old cape, or hanging, made from several buckskin hides sewn together and embellished with thousands of white marine snail shells. The shells form three figures – a human and two animals, one of which has cloven hooves like a deer – and a series of circles that probably represent settlements.
The Mantle may have belonged to the 17th-century Powhatan leader Wahunsenacawh, the father of Pocahontas. But its origin isn’t known with certainty, and like millions of other colonial-era buckskins, it crossed the ocean to Britain. By 1638 it had arrived in London, and today it’s held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
What does seem certain is that the culture that produced the Mantle was conscious of its kinship to deer, those key providers. On a visit last year to a recreated Powhatan village, I saw deer everywhere: their skulls and antlers made racks for hanging things, their furry hides were laid on beds, buckskin made moccasins and bags, and their bones and teeth made tools. Deer must have been a constant presence in everyday life – like plastic is for us, except that plastic implies no
Landseer invites them to admire this dominant stag, while imagining themselves dominating him
living animal neighbour.
There is something very potent about recognising that one’s life depends on the gifts of a large, abundant mammal, one that is very similar in size to a person. To my eye, all three figures on the Mantle, in their placement and equivalence, express that deep connection. It’s both physical and mythological.
By comparison, another famous deer image – Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen – brings forward a very different ethos: that of the individual, the hero, the patriarch. These are mythologies, too, but maybe harder for Westerners to see, because we’ve lived inside them for centuries.
This stag is a manly fellow: his neck is muscular, his antlers extend arrogantly into space, his posture is upright. He’s solitary, distinct from the background, magnificent and self-contained. In terms of his species, he appears to be an avatar of power and dominance
– we imagine that he’s overlooking a vast rutting territory that he’s already conquered, maybe sniffing the wind for potential rivals to be vanquished.
Of course, a mature male deer is also a target for human trophy hunters. And this is where the image gets really interesting. Sport hunters are its truest viewers; Landseer invites them to admire this dominant stag, while imagining themselves dominating him. This is hunting as a form of courtly man-to-man combat, and also as an echo of the larger project of Victorian society: overcoming nature and expanding empire.
In a way, this is just another version of the old shapeshifting story – humans and deer that turn into each other. This deer symbolises the same humans, captains of society and sires of families, that also want to pursue him and make him prove their own power. He carries much of the old iconic load, but to different ends. He’s being commodified, hollowed out. He no longer exists on his own terms.
Landseer was famous in his own time as a master painter and sculptor of animals; he meticulously studied their anatomy and his work was collected by Queen Victoria. He used paint to conjure the presence of an idealised stag. Powhatan’s Mantle, by contrast, not only depicts deer; it is deer. It’s made with the bodies of real deer who actually lived. As much as anything, that difference speaks to the divergent worldviews these works represent, and how modernised people have distorted our ties to wildlife.
Some artists on the leading edge today are using deer once again, to move back toward reciprocity between deer and people. Madison Creech is a young American artist who is concerned about the impact of roads on wildlife. She learned about a facility in Virginia where the bodies of roadkilled deer are composted – turned into a dark, fertile soil instead of being thrown into landfills. Last year, for an exhibition at the university where she teaches, she collected some of this compost and brought it right into the gallery, for viewers to see and smell.
“It just sort of smells like dirt,” she told me. But she was also struck by something else at the compost facility. “There is also this heat that's coming out. You see this steam cloud come out of something that used to be a body. And I sort of think about that as a final breath.”
Like the makers of Powhatan’s Mantle, but in a very contemporary way, she is using the bodies of deer. And like them, she is expressing the life-and-death connection we have always shared with these animals.
Erika Howsare’s nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbours, is published by Icon Books, out now, £20