AND ANOTHER THING
What Stubbs and Landseer would have thought of the anti-hunting mob
PAUL JOHNSON
his August I have been trying hard to improve my rudimentary skills in drawing animals. It ought to be easy. We are sur- rounded by them here. A party of energetic badgers has taken over the spinney up above our house, once the haunt only of foxes. The field next to ours is crowded with sheep. There are beautiful fawn- and cream-coloured bullocks beside our orchard. Horses are everywhere, and in the woods the red deer slink and stroll silently. Our garden is a magnet for hundreds of small birds and, above them, the buzzards and peregrines soar. But animals are rest- less creatures. The moment they are con- scious of your attention, they move away.
I consulted the works of our two greatest animal painters, George Stubbs and Edwin Landseer, to see how they overcame this dif- ficulty. Both drew animals in the wild on every possible occasion, all their lives, but I notice that when Stubbs was painting a race- horse or hunter, and needed to be totally accurate to satisfy its owner, he nearly always had it held by its stable lad. He spent years studying the dynamic structure of the horse, buying dead hacks to dissect and flay so he could master their musculature. His draw- ings of equine anatomy are the most com- plete and sensitive ever compiled.
As soon as he could afford it, Landseer bought Stubbs's collection and studied it eagerly, along with his own vast repertoire of animal life sketches. In addition, he rebuilt his studio-house in St John's Wood with huge doors so that not only horses but ani- mals of all sizes from the zoo could be brought to him. I imagine that, after long years of practice — his first important por- trait of a dog was done when he was nine he hardly needed to look at an animal body to get its proportions and line right. Once, after dinner, asked if he could draw with his left hand as well as his right, he demanded two pencils and paper. With his left hand he drew the head of a ten-pointer stag, and simultaneously he used his right hand to draw the head of a horse. I cannot under- stand how his brain coped with this effort no wonder he went mad in old age.
Stubbs and Landseer both loved animals with all their hearts, but also with a differ- ence. Stubbs observed them with total dis- passion. He was as objective as a camera. There is not the smallest touch of senti- ment in any of his paintings, either of trea- sured dogs and horses or of wild beasts like leopards and monkeys. He noted, recorded, but never commented. By contrast, Land- seer was a passionate romantic, who entered into all the feelings of the creatures he painted — their triumphs, fears, pains and death agonies — sometimes to the point of anthropomorphism. But both painters always put truth to nature before any other consideration, which is why their beasts, though scrutinised with such differ- ent eyes, are always alive.
I would like to hear the views of Stubbs and Landseer on the current vindictive cam- paign by self-proclaimed animal lovers against field sports. It is bad enough in Eng- land but far worse in Scotland and Wales, whose new kangaroo parliaments are domi- nated by lower-middle-class urban sub-intel- lectuals. Now that Marxism is dead and the unions impotent, it is the new form of class warfare. There is an irony here. In England, the passion for sports of all kinds, not least racing and hunting, has probably served as the most effective bridge between the class- es, otherwise divided by the chasm of wealth.
This was illustrated by a case at York in 1791 (Burdon v. Rhodes) in which Stubbs was involved. The jury was asked to decide whether the clerk of the local races, Rhodes, was right to withhold the stake money from an owner, Burdon, on the grounds that- he had invited a member of the lower classes, Rowntree, to ride his horse in a race con- fined to 'gentlemen'. The case revolved around how you defined a gentleman, and whether Rowntree fitted the definition. It was won when a much respected sporting baronet testified on Rowntree's behalf: '1 have never known him do a dirty trick.' The jury found for Burdon, amid general rejoic- ing. It was all in startling contrast to what was going on in France at this very time, where the Terror was about to begin. You have only to study the faces of the country- men dispassionately observed in Stubbs's canvases — reapers and farmers, jockeys and trainees, stable lads and milkmaids, dukes and generals — to perceive their fundamen- tal acceptance of roles in a society united by nature and sporting zeal and so to under- stand why the French Revolution could never have occurred in England.
For Landseer, the English love of sport, and its art, served as a personal bridge between the classes. He was born the son of an engraver, a trade then regarded as even less gentlemanly than painting. His father, though head of his profession, was denied the right to become a full member of the Royal Academy. Landseer's prodi- gious skill soon made him the honoured guest not just of Tory squires and Whig grandees, but even of the Queen. This was remarkable, for Victoria is on record as saying of one eminent artist, Sir Francis Grant RA, 'He was a gentleman, but lost his fortune and now paints for money.' But the Queen adored Landseer, to the point where she even tolerated his scandalous affair with the Duchess of Bedford.
Landseer and the Duchess would spend much of the summer in the 1840s in the beautiful Highland wilderness of Glen Fes- hie, then part of the Bedford estates. They lived rough, in tents, cabins or caves, eating the produce they caught, chiefly deer and salmon. I discovered and bought some years ago a superb watercolour by Landseer of an old woman wearing the discarded tweed coat of a stalker and wielding a long- handled spade. An inscription in Land- seer's hand records that she was Sarah, who lived in Tesshie Cottage', and that he pre- sented the drawing to 'the Dss. of B.'. Sarah used her spade to dig for worms for their fishing and spuds for their feasts. When the Duchess died, the Queen sent Landseer a heartfelt message of condolence.
Landseer's art accepted class as a fact but made him oblivious to it. In his own way he was a monarch of the glen himself. Whoever he was with, he liked to be on top. When he was old, and often drunk as well as mad, he was accompanied by a hag who acted as his keeper and ensured he got into no serious mischief. One day, his hostess, the Duchess of Abercorn, was in bed with a bad case of bron- chitis. Landseer visited her bedroom to con- dole, the hag waiting outside the door. Land- seer said to the Duchess, 'Your Grace, I am an old man with not long to live. May I take an unpardonable liberty?' The Duchess, thinking he wished to give her a kiss, signified her acceptance. Whereupon Landseer, with terri- fying agility, leapt on her bed and sat on her chest. Landseer was short (five foot three) but heavy. The Duchess, in her condition hardly able to breathe already, would certainly soon have died of suffocation. But the hag, who had been watching at the keyhole, burst in and dragged Landseer off her gasping Grace. Oh, for a Landseer to sit upon the chests of the tn- coteuses and sans-culottes who want to bring the Terror to our rural heartlands!
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