Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802–1873)

Painter and sculptor, born in London, son of an engraver and antiquary, three of whose sons were to distinguish themselves in the arts. Edwin was a prodigy, who drew and etched from a very early age, winning the ‘silver palette’ of the Royal Society of Arts in 1813. Already noted for his drawings and paintings of dogs, at the age of 14 he entered the Royal Academy Schools. In 1824 he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands, which were to provide him with some of his most recurrent subject matter. On the way north he stayed with Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and during subsequent visits to Scotland, Landseer was the guest of a number of aristocratic hosts, who became his patrons. On the one hand, Landseer achieved general popularity with such anthropomorphising animal paintings as Dignity and Impudence (1839, Tate Britain, London), which were widely diffused in the form of engravings, and on the other he brought a grandeur more often associated with history painting to the depiction of blood sports, particularly deer hunting. He was also a portrait painter, and sometimes combined portraiture with animal genre. He was a particular favourite of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom he painted on a number of occasions. Between 1858 and 1867 he branched out into sculpture with the four lions commissioned from him by the government for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. His vision of nature became increasingly epic, as in Flood in the Highlands (Aberdeen Art Gallery) completed in 1860, and even tragic, as in his reflection on the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew in the Arctic, entitled Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864, Royal Holloway College, Egham, Surrey). After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1840, Landseer became subject to periods of depression. His painterly powers persisted, despite increasing dementia and alcoholism, but in 1872, the year before his death, he was finally certified as insane.

Bibliography (updated 2024): J. Bronkhurst and R. Ormond, ‘Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry (1802–1873)’, ODNB, online edn (2004), 2012; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xxvi, xxxii, xxxiv, 372, 430; R. Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Gallery, London), London, 1981; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxi, 185, 284–87.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011