Two greyhounds standing in an extensive hilly landscape, with a dead hare in the foreground.

Philip Reinagle, R.A. (Edinburgh 1749–1833 London) was one of the foremost painters of animals in Georgian England and was only second to the great George Stubbs when it came to the painting of animals in a sensitive manner and with anatomical precision.

He was the son of a Hungarian musician who had served in the army of Maria Theresa and who came to Scotland with the Young Pretender. At age fourteen he became a pupil of Allan Ramsay, and later an assistant, helping with portrait commissions including several portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. In 1769 he moved to London and attended the Royal Academy Schools becoming an Associate Royal Academician in 1787 and full Royal Academician in 1812.

From around 1785, his focus shifted from portraits to the painting of dogs, horses, cattle and birds, often within extensive, atmospheric landscapes.

A set of eleven paintings of dogs, smaller than the present painting, were completed for The Sportsman's Cabinet publication by the English veterinary surgeon William Taplin which sold at Sotheby's London,  13 November 1991, lots 104–113.

The Sportsman's Repository, another publication dating to 1820 to which Reinagle contributed Greyhounds, records that 'The greyhound is of a beautiful and delicate formation for speed and majestic attraction; if a metaphorical allusion may by made between the human and the brute creation, the allegory would not be too far extended in considering the greyhound, for his appearance, equanimity, mildness and affability, one of the superior classes of his own society.'

Alongside publishers, aristocratic patrons would also commission the artist to capture their favoured animals in an appropriate setting. A similar view of pointers stalking grouse in a landscape, showing the dogs of Lord Middleton and dated to 1792, was sold at Sotheby's London, 6 July 1977, lot 55.

He collaborated with John Russell on a portrait of Colonel Thornton and painted 'Breaking covert' which was ordered as a pendant to Sawrey Gilpin's famous painting 'Death of a fox'. He also worked with George Morland painting 'Meet in Dorsetshire with hunting portraits of Mr and Mrs Francis Fane and other members of the hunt'. His pupils were Thomas Lister, 2nd Lord Ribblesdale and Henry Howard, later secretary of the RA, who married one of Reinagle's daughters.