The man behind his work was seen through it—sensitive, variously gifted, manly, genial, tender-hearted, simple and unaffected; a lover of animals, children and humanity; and if any one wishes to see at a glance nearly all we have written, let him look at Landseer's portrait, painted by himself, with a canine connoisseur on either side.
—Monkhouse
LANDSEER
Happy lives make dull biographies. Young women with ambitions should be very cautious lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.
"Miss Pott—the beautiful Miss Pott," they called her. The biographers didn't take time to give her first name, nor recount her pedigree, so rapt were they with her personality. They only say, "She was tall, willowy and lissome; and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her picture as a peasant beauty, bearing on her well-poised head a sheaf of corn."
It was at the house of Macklin, the rich publisher, that John Landseer, the engraver, met Miss Pott. She was artistic in all her instincts; and as she knew the work of the brilliant engraver and named his best pieces without hesitation he grew interested. Men grow interested when you know and appreciate their work; sometimes they grow more interested, at which time they are also interesting.
And so it came about that they were married, the beautiful Miss Pott and John Landseer, and it can also be truthfully added that they were happy ever afterward.