Word: landseer
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...expect her to pop out like a cuckoo on a clock, but there isn't even a painting of her on view -- only her ancestors. The burden falls on Queen Victoria, whose portrait en famille by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (who was to her and Prince Albert what Edwin Landseer was to their many dogs) must be the single most sentimental piece of kitsch in the palace and accordingly gets more attention from the visitor stream than any Rubens or Rembrandt. Now and again some palace functionary, neatly tailored and with a face like a silver teapot, glides through the crowd...
Reading your article on Artist Edwin Landseer [Nov. 16] reminded me of the story about his famous painting The Monarch of the Glen. As a guest of Queen Victoria, Landseer went deerstalking with a gillie from Balmoral. After following a five-pointer stag for over four hours, they had it trapped in a corrie. At that moment Landseer quickly laid down his gun, pulled out a pad and pencil, and started sketching. The proud animal became the famous "monarch...
...spaniel Dash, or Albert's black greyhound Eos. Sometimes they were proletarian lurchers and terriers. Almost always, however, they were moralized. The "pathetic fallacy," the somewhat tiresome habit of affixing human feelings and traits to animals or plants, reached its height in Victorian England. It was Landseer's use of it, along with his extraordinarily realistic observation of fur, fin and feather, that made him a demigod of popular culture...
...speak, are the apes of morality. Animals want to be men and imitate the better aspects of human behavior-fidelity, tenacity, bravery, gentleness. They cannot make the last evolutionary step, but how consoling to see each doggy eye moist with the desire to do so! Such is the message Landseer transmitted, over and over again...
...this show-admirably curated by Art Historians Richard Ormond, Robin Hamlyn and Joseph Rishel-soon makes clear that Landseer was more than a "mere" sentimentalist. To see him after such long disfavor is to see him afresh, and his affinities with other artists now seem more striking than his provincialism. Some of his hunt scenes have a positively Rubenesque wallop and energy, and his feeling for "sublime" landscape-the misty crags and glens of the Highlands-connects him to northern European romanticism, in particular to Caspar David Friedrich. When he let his sense of nature as a ground of elemental...