Goat and Kids.
of his home in a quiver of glad recognition of the shelter; he looks up with a whimper, and gleefully wags his tail, for the beast has been a vagrant. In the foreground occurs one of those little points of by-play such as often occur in Landseer’s designs. Here a snail, who does not quit his home, but rather carries it on his back, is travelling slowly and noiselessly towards the water-dish of the spaniel.
In 1842 there likewise appeared, but at the Academy, the most dexterously painted “Pair of Brazilian Monkeys, the property of the Queen,” the dashing form of “Breeze,” a retriever, which has been engraved by Mr. C. G. Lewis, and the ever-beautiful figure of “Eos,” that model of grace, a greyhound belonging to Prince Albert, which Mr. T. Landseer engraved faultlessly. In this picture Sir Edwin must have been happy, for the grace, fulness of refinement, high feeling for beauty, and that defect of the animal which arose from over-civilization, were here, and he painted them perfectly. The very defect of his art suited the truth of the subject, and “Eos” in the engraving seems the finest example of the finest strain of Landseer’s art.
“The Sanctuary” was of this year, and akin in its inspiration to those which showed Landseer at work in snow and ice, with new subjects, and hardly ever tried by an artist of his standing. The latter are the admirable “Coming Events cast their Shadows before them,” of 1844, and “Night and Morning,” the noble designs of 1853. “The Sanctuary” illustrated the refuge of a long-hunted stag on an island, or on the coast of Loch Maree; the swimming beast approaches the shore, and perfectly represents the pathos of the verses:—
“See, where the startled wild-fowl screaming rise,
And seek in marshall’d flight those golden skies;
Yon wearied swimmer scarce can win the land,
His limbs yet falter on the watery strand.
Poor hunted hart! the painful struggle o’er,
How blest the shelter of that island shore!
There, whilst he sobs, his panting heart to rest,
Nor hound nor hunter shall his lair molest.”
We all remember the water dripping from the flanks of the beast, the swerving line, a little too mechanically drawn, of the flying fowl, the even colour of the twilight sky, the gleaming of the water, a surface broken only by the track of the ripples the exhausted swimmer’s shoulders had set in motion. The picture belongs to the Queen, and was in the International Exhibition, 1862, and at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1853; and while there attracted much less attention than it deserved from the French, who demand qualities which Landseer did not always succeed in furnishing. We do not think it was on account of the pathos of this picture that the jury awarded him the great gold medal, he being the only English painter to receive it; many Englishmen desired that Mulready should obtain this distinction, and the award in Landseer’s favour puzzled many, because he was much less a painter per se than Mulready, who expected a decision in the reverse direction.
