“In 1815, Mr. Landseer, the engraver, had brought his boys to me and said, ‘When do you let your beard grow, and take pupils?’ I said, ‘If my instructions are useful and valuable, now,’ ‘Will you let my boys come?’ I said, ‘Certainly.’ Charles and Thomas, it was immediately arranged, should come every Monday, when I was to give them work for the week. Edwin took my dissections of the lion, and I advised him to dissect animals—the only mode of acquiring instruction than even the Academy afforded.” It would appear from this account that Edwin Landseer was not a pupil of Haydon’s in the sense of that term, which is applicable to his brothers’ studies, This notion seems to be supported, if not confirmed, by what is recorded hereafter.[23] It will not be forgotten that long before this date all the Landseers had made very considerable progress under their father, and so far as regards Edwin this is affirmed by Haydon.[23]
The pupils who followed the Landseers to Haydon’s studio were, Bewick, son of an upholsterer of Darlington, who died in 1866, without making any deep sign in art, and is the subject of Mr. T. Landseer’s biography, above mentioned; Harvey, the author of so many thousand designs for woodcuts, familiar to all headers of the “Penny Magazine,” and the by no means happy illustrator of the “Arabian Nights;” Edwin Chatfield, who died young; and George Lance, the popular fruit-painter. Of Thomas Christmas, another of Haydon’s pupils, we speak elsewhere. Before the Landseers studied under Haydon’s directions, Charles Lock Eastlake, the late President of the Royal Academy, had received invaluable counsel from a man whose broken career and hapless fortunes—which were, doubtless, in no small degree, of his own producing—are among the sad facts in the history of English painting. Haydon goes on: “All these young men looked up to me as their instructor and their friend. I took them under my care, taught them everything I knew, explained the principles of Raphael’s works in my collection of his prints, and did the same thing over again which I had done to Eastlake, without one shilling of payment from them, any more than from him. They improved rapidly. The gratitude of themselves and of their friends knew no bounds.” So far, so good; what follows of the writer’s career concerns us not now. Haydon was painting “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” and occupied a position which is rather difficult for men of another day fairly to appreciate. He had finished, with extraordinary éclat, “The Judgment of Solomon,” and, on account of the success this obtained, fancied himself at the top of the tree. He had certainly begun well for himself, and his earnest advocacy of the Elgin Marbles was honourable to him. To this advocacy he attributed an importance that was in excess of the fact, although it was of great service. He was a valuable champion in art by means of these marbles, and the studies which he made his pupils produce from them, to say nothing of the effect of his introducing to other countries casts of the statues, and promoting the bringing to London several of the Cartoons of Raphael, which his pupils Charles and Thomas Landseer drew manfully at the British Institution. Edwin Landseer made studies from the same works.
The catalogues of pictures exhibited in various galleries show that Edwin Landseer was at this period domiciled with his father and brothers, and Mr. Henry Landseer, his uncle, at 33, Foley Street or Foley Place. A few doors off, at No. 30, lived Thomas Campbell, a fellow-lecturer with John Landseer at the Royal Institution, where he delivered “Discourses on English Poetry.” This house was of much superior character to that which its present appearance indicates; the whole of the Foley Street region has “gone down” in the world within the writer’s memory of forty years’ duration.[24]
Haydon’s studio, at 41, Great Marlborough Street, was near for a youth’s walk; and that artist, with ill-concealed difficulties gathering around him, struggled yet against them without a sign of failure. Burlington House, where the Elgin marbles were placed while critical combats were waged about them ere they found a home in the British Museum, was close at hand, and the noblest academy for study. Independently of Haydon’s declaration, there can be no doubt that the Landseers derived immense benefit from the study of those models, even if they have shown nothing that can be directly referred to them. It is in the formation of style that one would expect benefit from these types, rather than in mere copying their characteristics. We fancy that in Landseer’s dogs, such as “A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society,” “Suspense,” and wherever breadth and grandeur of elements are involved, are results of impressions thus made. We cannot conceive a student who is familiar with these examples losing the ideas he had obtained from them. Not only did these works afford lessons which occurred fortunately with studies from Nature, but the advice of Haydon, that his pupils should dissect, was the sure guide to success. Having received such instructions from John Landseer as fixed Nature in his mind as the ever-present and indisputable director; and from Haydon the injunction to study the marbles as models of style, together with counsel and aid in dissecting human and leonine subjects, Edwin Landseer’s powers were in the fairest way of development. Ability and energy must have done the rest; they were all-sufficient to bring that reputation which is so widely spread.
To a mere painter of portraits of animals, no such fame, no such abundance of thanks as are due to Landseer would have accrued. A picture of Mr. So-and-So’s favourite mastiff, nay, a mere likeness of a favourite lap-dog, would, except to a few of the enthusiastic, have been nought to mankind; worse than nought for the reputation of the painter who failed to impart pathos and character to his productions, and so make, in one of them, the hat and gloves of a gentleman not unwelcome to
The Rabbit Warren.
those who looked for nobler works from such masterly hands.[25] Yet there were not wanting men who, when the hat and gloves in question occupied prominent positions in a fine picture by Landseer, demurred greatly to his expending time on these objects, which had been better otherwise employed. To a hat and gloves could not, by any process known to humanity, be imparted either pathos or character. Even Edwin Landseer failed in this, and there were those who distinguished between the more heartily wrought and truly pathetic pictures, and such representations of domesticities. The distinction which many professed to draw between these pieces of genre painting and “A Dialogue at Waterloo,” which represents the Duke of Wellington and his daughter-in-law, was that in the one the painter’s heart was set open by his subject, whereas in the others there was nothing to open the heart. Although produced with but few years between them, the style of the former is weak, timid, and thin; that of the latter, solid, masterly, and broad. It has been said, doubtless by way of apologizing for the shortcomings of the domesticities, that the inspiration of the inferior works was a graceful one. Although later in its origin, we saw more of the studies to which we just referred in the “Waterloo,” than in the intermediary genre pictures. Here, then, are examples (1) of mere portraiture, lacking pathos, and failing even in Landseer’s hands; (2) a pathetic, grand subject moving him when the Duke of Wellington was in question and Waterloo to aid, in forming a contrasted subject with that of a lady’s chamber and other scenes of his work. Experts could hardly believe their eyes when the unfortunate pictures appeared with Landseer’s name to them. It was not, then, in mere portraiture that success was to be looked for when neither pathos nor character are present. Yet these pictures are recognized as the failures of our artist; and we refer to them here, because they are no less antipathetic and antithetical to many others which we have yet to describe, than to the studies we have just indicated. As to Landseer’s studies, Mr. Ruskin wrote, in “Pre-Raphaelitism,” p. 30:—“Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I need not point out to any one acquainted with his earlier works the labour, or watchfulness of nature they involve, nor need I do more than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout to be found in those parts of them which are least like what had been before accomplished; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.” Undoubtedly Landseer learned next to nothing from Raphael. In the next chapter we shall show that he enjoyed facilities for studying the “Cartoons,” i.e. those examples of Raphael’s art which are greatest in style. By means of the Elgin marbles Landseer was imbued with that care for style which distinguished his best works, from “Fighting Dogs,” to the “Swannery Invaded,” one of his earlier, and one of his later pictures.