Rodolphus: "Quite so. But the short one seems to harmonize better with the kind of furniture I go in for—buhl and marqueterie, don't you know."
Sir Edwin Landseer
Landseer had often been severely handled by Punch for his accommodating courtiership, but when he died in the autumn of 1873, the long set of memorial verses which appeared on October 11 overlook this infirmity and concentrate on Landseer's services as a teacher of sympathy between man and brute. He was the first of painters who "give dumb things a soul"—in the faithful collie in the lone shieling with his head on his master's coffin; in his St. Bernards and antlered monarchs of the glen. It may be objected that the soul which Landseer gave his animals was a human soul and a sentimental one at that, and that Bewick had forestalled him with a more accurate diagnosis; but the insistence on Landseer's services as a promoter of the entente cordiale between man and beast is well justified. Landseer at the moment of his passing was probably, as Punch contends, "our best-known name in Art." The writer of the verses traces the official recognition of artists abroad:—
Till even upon this, our little isle
That looms so large in light of various fames,
The fair Queen deigned at last, though late, to smile
And dubbed her Knights—a few but glorious names.
But surely this is to overlook the knighthoods of Van Dyck and Lely (both from the Netherlands), to say nothing of Sir Joshua.
The campaign directed against the extravagances of aestheticism by Du Maurier belongs in the main to a later decade, but even in the early 'seventies the vagaries of preciosity had already begun to furnish him with fruitful subjects for genial satire.