Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was eminent among English animal
painters. No artist has done more to teach us how to love animals and to
enforce the truth that
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small.”
Not only did Landseer rival some of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth
century in painting fur and feathers, but he depicted animals with
sympathy, as if he believed that “the dumb, driven cattle” possess souls.
His dogs and other animals are so human as to look as if they were able
to speak. The painter was the son of John Landseer, the engraver, and
was born in London. He received art lessons from his father, and, when
little more than a baby, would sketch donkeys, horses, and cows at
Hampstead Heath. Some of these sketches, made when Landseer was five,
seven, and ten years old, are at Kensington. He was only fourteen when
he exhibited the heads of “A Pointer Bitch and Puppy.” When between
sixteen and seventeen he produced “Dogs Fighting,” which was engraved by
the painter’s father. Still more popular was “The Dogs of St. Gothard
rescuing a Distressed Traveler,” which appeared when its author was
eighteen. Landseer was not a pupil of Haydon, but he had occasional
counsel from him. He dissected a lion. As soon as he reached the age
of twenty-four he was elected A.R.A., and exhibited at the Academy
“The Hunting of Chevy Chase.” This was in 1826, and in 1831 he became
a full member of the Academy. Landseer had visited Scotland in 1826,
and from that date we trace a change in his style, which thenceforth
was far less solid, true and searching, and became more free and bold.
The introduction of deer into his pictures, as in “The Children of the
Mist,” “Seeking Sanctuary,” and “The Stag at Bay,” marked the influence
of Scotch associations. Landseer was knighted in 1850, and at the French
exhibition of 1855 was awarded the only large gold medal given to an
English artist. Prosperous, popular, and the guest of the highest
personages of the realm, he was visited about 1852 by an illness which
compelled him to retire from society. From this he recovered, but the
effects of a railway accident in 1868 brought on a relapse. He died in
1873, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. On the death of Sir Charles
Eastlake, in 1865, he was offered the Presidentship of the Royal Academy,
but this honor he declined. In the National Gallery are “Spaniels of King
Charles’s Breed,” “Low Life and High Life,” “Highland Music” (a highland
piper disturbing a group of five hungry dogs, at their meal, with a blast
on the pipes), “The Hunted Stag,” “Peace,” “War” (dying and dead horses,
and their riders lying amidst the burning ruins of a cottage), “Dignity
and Impudence,” “Alexander and Diogenes,” “The Defeat of Comus,” a sketch
painted for a fresco in the Queen’s summer house, Buckingham Palace.
Sixteen of Landseer’s works are in the Sheepshanks Collection, including
the touching “Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” of which Mr. Ruskin said
that “it stamps its author not as the neat imitator of the texture of a
skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as the man of mind.”