The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

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       SIR EDWIN LANDSEER

      Painter: ‘His paintings are known…through the length and breadth of the land.’

      1 OCTOBER 1873

      WE HAVE TO announce, with deep regret, the death yesterday morning, at 10.40, of Sir Edwin Landseer. Sir Edwin had been long known to be in a most precarious state of health, but the news will not the less shock and grieve the worlds both of Art and of Society, in which he was an equal favourite. The great painter never, however, courted publicity; he was singularly reticent about all that concerned himself, and it is astonishing to find how little was known to his contemporaries respecting his early career.

      The grandfather of Sir Edwin, we are told, settled as a jeweller in London in the middle of the last century; and here, it is said, his father, Mr. John Landseer, was born in 1761, though another account fixes Lincoln as his birthplace, and his birth itself at a later date. John Landseer became an engraver, rose to eminence in his line of art, became an Associate of the Royal Academy, and, having held that position for nearly 50 years, died in 1852. He was largely employed in engraving pictures for the leading publishers, including Macklin, who engaged him on the illustrations to his ‘Bible;’ this employment led to his marriage with a Miss Pot, a great friend of the Macklins, and whose portrait as a peasant girl, with a sheaf of corn upon her head, was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The issue of this marriage consisted of three daughters and also of three sons – Thomas born in or about the year 1795; Charles, born in 1799; and Edwin, the youngest, in 1802. In 1806 Mr. John Landseer delivered to large audiences at the Royal Institution in Albemarle-street a series of lectures on engraving, in which he laid down broader, higher, and truer views of that branch of art than those which had hitherto prevailed. His name will also be remembered by many as the author or Observations on the Engraved Gems brought from Babylon to England by Mr. Abraham Lockeit in 1817; Saboean Researches, another work on the same subject; and a Description of Fifty of the Earliest Pictures in the National Gallery. He subsequently edited the Review of the Fine Arts and the Probe. Later in life he exhibited at the Academy some water-colour studies from Druidical Temples, and finally engraved his son Edwin’s ‘Dogs of St. Bernard,’ of which he wrote also a small explanatory pamphlet. The chief work, however, of John Landseer lay in bringing up his three sons, of whom the eldest is as well known by his engravings as was his father, and the second was elected keeper of the Academy in 1851. The artistic education of Edwin Landseer was commenced at an early age under the eye of his father, who, after the example of the greatest masters, directed him to the study of nature herself, and sent him constantly to Hampstead-heath and other suburban localities to make studies of donkeys, sheep, and goats. A series of early drawings and etchings from his hand, preserved in the South Kensington Museum, will serve to show how faithful and true an interpreter of nature the future Academician was even more than half a century since, for some of his efforts are dated as early as his eighth year, so that he is a standing proof that precocity does not always imply subsequent failure. Indeed, he drew animals correctly and powerfully even before he was five years old!

      His first appearance, however, as a painter dates from 1815, when, at the age of 13, he exhibited two paintings at the Academy; they are entered in the catalogue as Nos. 443 and 584; ‘Portrait of a Mule’ and ‘Portraits of a Pointer Bitch and Puppy,’ and the young painter appears as: Master E. Landseer,33, Foley-street. In the following year he was one of the exhibitors at ‘the Great Room in Spring-gardens,’ then engaged for ‘the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours,’ along with De Wint, Chalon, and the elder Pugin; about the same time, too, we find him receiving regular instruction in art as a pupil in the studio of Haydon, and the residence of the family in Foley-street was the very centre of a colony of artists and literary celebrities. Mulready, Stothard, Benjamin West, A. E. Chalon, Collins, Constable, Daniel, Flaxman, and Thomas Campbell all lived within a few hundred yards of John Landseer’s house; and from their society young Landseer, we may be sure, took care to draw profit and encouragement. He also derived considerable assistance from a study of the Elgin marbles at Burlington-house, where they lay for some time before finding a home in the British Museum. These ancient treasures he was led to study by the advice of his teacher Haydon. In the same year (1816) he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy. In the following year he exhibited ‘Brutus, a portrait of a Mastiff,’ at the Academy, and also a ‘Portrait of an Alpine Mastiff;’ at the Gallery in Spring-gardens already mentioned.

      With the year 1818 commenced an important epoch in the life of Landseer. His ‘Fighting Dogs Getting Wind,’ exhibited this summer at the rooms of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours, excited an extraordinary amount of attention; and, being purchased by Sir George Beaumont, it set the stream of fashion in his favour. Sir David Wilkie, writing to Haydon at this date, remarked, as much in earnest as in jest, ‘Young Landseer’s jackasses are good.’