Created in 1998, Bloodhound Panel occupies a remarkable place in Banksy’s early history. As recorded in Seven Years with Banksy, published in 2012, Banksy stated that this was the first artwork he ever sold. This gives the work exceptional biographical significance: not simply as an early Banksy, but as an object directly connected to the moment his practice first entered the world of collecting. Painted before the global fame, auction records, museum debates and cultural mythology that would later surround him, Bloodhound Panel belongs to Banksy’s formative Bristol period. It takes us back to the years when his visual language was still being forged directly on walls, boards, panels and found surfaces — before the name Banksy had become shorthand for an entire cultural phenomenon. The image of the bloodhound is a powerful early subject. Traditionally associated with scent, pursuit, obedience and authority, the animal carries an atmosphere of tension and control. In Banksy’s hands, however, such imagery is never merely illustrative. Even at this early stage, his instinct was to take familiar symbols and shift their meaning — turning the ordinary into something charged, humorous, unsettling or politically suggestive. The bloodhound may evoke policing, surveillance or the mechanics of pursuit, but it also carries a strange vulnerability: an animal bred to follow a trail, compelled by forces it does not choose. This duality is central to Banksy’s art. His best-known works often combine wit with unease, charm with critique, and simplicity with unexpected depth. Bloodhound Panel already contains the seeds of that language. It has the directness of street imagery — immediate, legible and memorable — but also the ambiguity that has made Banksy’s work so enduring. Rather than dictating a single reading, the image allows several meanings to coexist. Is the bloodhound a figure of authority, a servant of authority, or a victim of it? Is it comic, threatening, absurd, or poignant? The strength of the work lies in this open tension. The date, 1998, is particularly significant. Banksy’s activity in Bristol during the late 1990s was part of a broader underground culture of graffiti, music, club nights and independent creative energy. Before the international exhibitions and headline-making interventions, his work emerged from a distinctly local environment: quick, public, anti-institutional and alive to the street. Works from this period are rare, especially those with clear early provenance and a direct connection to the artist’s own account of his beginnings. As a panel work, Bloodhound Panel also bridges two worlds: the street and the collectible object. Banksy’s later career would continually test the boundary between public art and private ownership, between anti-establishment gesture and art-market value. This work sits at the very start of that paradox. Given Banksy’s own statement, recorded in Seven Years with Banksy, that the panel was the first artwork he ever sold, Bloodhound Panel marks the moment at which his image-making crossed from the informal world of graffiti and exchange into the realm of collecting. In hindsight, that transition feels historically loaded. There is also a particular intimacy to early Banksy works. They do not yet carry the burden of icon status. They are not trying to be “Banksy” in the way the world now understands the name. Instead, they reveal an artist finding his tools, his tone and his audience. The humour is sharper because it is less polished; the image feels closer to source; the object retains the urgency of something made before the market knew what it was looking at. For collectors, Bloodhound Panel is therefore more than an early work. It is a point of origin. Its importance lies not only in its date or rarity, but in its relationship to the artist’s own narrative. To stand before it is to encounter Banksy before the myth had fully formed — before Girl with Balloon, before the museum pranks, before the shredded canvas, before the global brand and cultural phenomenon. Bloodhound Panel is a rare surviving witness to the beginning of that story: direct, instinctive and historically resonant. As the first artwork Banksy stated he ever sold, it represents a defining threshold — the moment an anonymous Bristol artist began the journey from the street into art history.