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Updated: June 19, 2025
Probably Edwin Landseer's education began a hundred years before he was born; but his technical instruction in art began when he was three years old, when his father would take him out on the Heath and placing him on the grass, put pencil and paper in his hand and let him make a picture of a goat nibbling the grass.
A few years after, I stood lost in admiration before Sir Edwin Landseer's inimitable picture of "the monkey who had seen the world," in which nature and truth lend their tone and force to the highest efforts of art; when a voice exclaimed, "How can you waste your time looking at that thing; such creatures ought never to have been painted;" and although the speaker was a religious man, he muttered to himself, "I am not sure they ought ever to have been made."
Do you know, I have one really fine old engraving, that Bob says is quite a genuine thing; and then there is that pencil-sketch that poor Schöne made for me the month before he died, it is truly artistic." "And I have a couple of capital things of Landseer's," said Bob. "There's no danger that your rooms will not be pretty," said I, "now you are fairly on the right track."
That was the house in which Landseer's loving old father spent his last days and finally died. A story is told of the witty D'Orsay, who would call out at the door, when he went to visit the artist: "Landseer, keep de dogs off me, I want to come in and some of dem will bite me and dat fellow in de corner is growling furiously."
And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aërial grace of Malbone's "Hours," Albert Durer's mediaeval sanctities, Overbeck's conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's "Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's, the misty depths of Turner's "Carthage," Domenichino's "Sibyl," Claude's sunset, or Allston's "Rosalie," how much of eras in Art, events in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius do they each foreshadow and embalm!
At the exhibition of Landseer's works after his death, the sight of these groups recalled to elderly men and women who had been his early neighbours, the days when a goodly cavalcade of ladies and gentlemen, with their grooms, on horseback, used to sweep past the windows, and the word went that the young Queen was honouring the painter by a visit to his studio.
A dog so clothed is not funny the artist is. The point has also been made that in Landseer's work there was no progression no evolution. His pictures of mountain scenery done in Scotland before he was thirty mark high tide. To him never again came the same sweep of joyous spirit or surge of feeling.
This year's Academy Exhibition contained Millais's "Black Brunswicker," Landseer's "Flood in the Highlands," and Phillips's "Marriage of the Princess Royal," now in the great corridor at Windsor Castle. "The Idyls of the King," much admired by the Prince, were the poems of the year.
It was not until about 1860 that the Skye Terrier attracted much notice among dog lovers south of the Border, but Queen Victoria's admiration of the breed, of which from 1842 onwards she always owned favourite specimens, and Sir Edwin Landseer's paintings in which the Skye was introduced, had already drawn public attention to the decorative and useful qualities of this terrier.
These elk are smaller than those of the mountains, and bear a striking resemblance to the Scotch red deer, so familiar to us in Landseer's pictures. For years they have been protected by the generosity and wisdom of one man, now no longer young, an altogether public-spirited and generous act.
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