I asked my AI since, for this, I see it merely as a superpowered Google search and not writing content for me. It did not find an answer but its response might help you. It is pasted below:
I couldn’t nail it, and I don’t want to hand you a confident wrong answer. But I did turn up a few things that should make the hunt much easier, including one that I think explains why the searches keep failing.
The composition they’re describing is a known scene — it just isn’t the one everybody paints.
In the Golden Legend, George wounds the dragon but doesn’t kill it there. The princess ties her girdle around its neck and the subdued dragon is led into the town on a leash made from the princess’s girdle, paraded before the townsfolk. She leads the dragon to the city, and only there does the saint kill it. Uccello even compresses both moments into one panel, with the princess using her belt as a leash to take the dragon up to the town. “Defender of the Faith”: Rembrandt Taylor’s Dragon-slayer. - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas +2
So: female figure, tamed dragon walking alongside, townspeople gathered and staring. That’s the scene. It’s why Burne-Jones keeps getting suggested — his St George cycle includes exactly that panel. And it’s probably why bobkitty is 10000% sure it isn’t St. George: in this scene George is often absent, off to the side, or not identifiable. The painting may well be catalogued under his name anyway.
That gives much better search vocabulary than “dragon painting”: tamed dragon led into the city, princess leading the dragon, Cleodolinda, Princess Sabra, triumph of the dragon.
Non-George legends with the identical shape, worth searching if they’re truly sure:
- Saint Martha and the Tarasque — she leads the subdued beast into Tarascon with her girdle, crowd assembled.
- Saint Romain and the Gargouille of Rouen — the captured monster is led through the streets.
- Saint Clement and the Graoully of Metz — same, and it was re-enacted as a civic parade for centuries.
Artists whose work fits “Renaissance style, dark, large, sells prints online”: Donato Giancola is the closest match on every axis — he combines Renaissance and Baroque technique with fantasy subjects, explicitly working from the grand triptychs of Rubens, and he does in fact build large works into triptychs, as with his Agincourt painting, which became a triptych with a portrait on the left and a gathering of survivors on the right. That “gathering of figures in a side panel” detail matches the townspeople memory suspiciously well. Others in the same lane: Omar Rayyan (Old Master-inflected paintings of monstrous beasts, sold as prints), Justin Gerard, Scott Gustafson, Paul Bonner, Michael Hutter. The Art Renewal Center’s ARC Salon archive is a good place to browse contemporary realists by subject. Donato Giancola Oil Painting Reproductions - NiceArtGallery.com +3
Two practical moves for bobkitty that beat guessing:
- Discourse keeps a record of what you interacted with. If they liked or replied to that post,
in:likes or in:bookmarks in the SDMB search box will surface it, and their own profile activity feed is browsable by date. Google works better than the built-in search too: site:boards.straightdope.com dragon painting with a custom date range.
- Post the description to r/TipOfMyTongue and r/WhatIsThisPainting. That crowd is very good at exactly this, and “dragon on a leash, everyone facing front” is a distinctive enough hook.
If you want, paste any of this into the thread. And if bobkitty can remember roughly when the link was posted, or which thread it was in, that narrows it enormously — that’s the single most useful missing detail.
ETA:
