LANDSEER STUDIES.*

THERE are two great varieties of artistic success which must be carefully discriminated, if we would form a sound judgment of any artist's work,—the success which attends some men from the very beginning of their career, and which apparently depends more upon favourable conjunctions of temperament and circum- stance than actual individual merit ; and that success which is won more slowly and painfully, in spite of obstacles, by indisputable strength of genius and unwearied labour. And it is to be noticed that the durability of the artist's reputation after death is but too frequently found to be in an inverse ratio to his popularity while living ; he but tod frequently toils but,— " To break a grave and fall therein."

There is, however, one consolation, and that of not slight import- ance, which can be held out to the unpopular worker who struggles hardly onward, without encouragement from friends and patrons, and that is, that the atmosphere of friends and patrons is, as a rule, a deadly one for art. It does seem to appear an almost universal truth in the history of art, that directly it has become " laureate " in any particular case its powers have begun to fail ; that you may have grand pictures from the cloister and the garret, • rad ..4tudies etf Sir Ecitosn. Lamiseer. By Como Monkhoixso. London: Virtue and 0o.

Pictures by Sir E. Landseer. By Como Monkhouse. Louden: Virtue and Co.

but hardly from the palace, from hands weary with labour and . hearts heavy with care and grief, but scarcely from tenderly- nurtured bodies and spirits sunk in luxurious ease. Art reverses the fable of the pelican, and requires its children to give their life's blood for its sustenance. We do not say this is quite. universally the case, nor that it is necessary for the majority of the pictures we see round us, but only as a general rule that the height of aim is found associated with but little popular or pecuniary success.

We have made these few remarks, as they appeared to us to touch nearly upon the work of the artist whose power we intend to strive to give an estimate of, and to account, partially at all events, for certain shortcomings which are visible in his painting. Edwin Landseer was born seventy-five years since, in Foley Street, and came of a thoroughly artistic family. His father John Landseer, who was a well-known engraver and lecturer upon art, taught him to draw at the early age of five, and en- couraged him a year or two later to go into the fields round, Hampstead and sketch the sheep, cows, &c., there to be found. Mr. Monkhouse does not tell us, and we have never heard,. whether Landseer's devotion to animals arose mainly from his father's teaching, or was the result of a natural bent of disposi- tion; in any case, however, there must have been great natural ability, which from childhood to manhood flowed steadily in one direction, that of animal representation. We will not delay our readers with accounts of the sheep he drew at eight years old, the lions he drew at nine, and the bulls he drew at ten ; all these minutia, with sketches to represent them, will be found duly set down in Mr. Monkhouse's most elaborate language, but give a summary in as few words as possible of his early work. From 1808 (when he was six years old) to 1824—that is, for the first twenty-two years of his life—he may be said to have devoted his time almost entirely to the study of animal form, producing during that time little but mere student-work. During this. period the chief part of his attention had been given to dogs,. though he had also drawn lions, horses, bulls, donkeys, swine,. and indeed pretty nearly every animal he could come across. Up to the year 1824 he seems to have had but one object, that of literal truth, and there is entirely absent from these sketches any of the romantic, and occasionally overstrained sentiment, which particularly distinguished him in after-life. In 1814 he visited Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and to the influence exercised upon him by the great author, and to the scenery and associations of Scotland, may be traced a great portion of the work of his more mature years. For the next ten years, the majority of his pictures were of quite another stamp to the earlier work,. studies of deer and Highland life, illustrations to Scott, and showed progress in landscape painting ; finally, we find dozens of portraits of various members of the aristocracy, which mark the transition in the artist's feeling and style of painting. From this period onward to 1837 was his period of best work, cul- minating in the picture of 44 The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner," and from 1837 down to 1873, the year of his death, he produced no picture approaching to that conception in power and pathos. From year to year henceforward his art became more and more popular, and more inspired by the populace, and the very names of his pictures were chosen with a view to effect. The dog and deer pictures, always his best, became fewer, and in their stead we have large works, of such a kind as "A Dialogue at Waterloo," "Man, Proposes, God Disposes," "The Swannery Invaded by Eagles," and innumerable portraits of the Queen, Prince Albert, and any number of Princesses, of all which the less said the better. Before entering into particulars as to Sir Edwin's work and its rank amongst that of contemporaries, we should, perhaps, say a few words concerning the manner in which Mr. Monkhouse has per- formed the difficult task of selecting, arranging, and describing the studies and pictures which form the bulk of the volumes before us.

The selection and arrangement have apparently been performed: with care and judgment, though it is noticeable with regard to the first of these, that there are no examples given of studies for any of the better-known pictures, with the exception of the study of two stags' heads for the picture of the combat, and a very slight sketch of "Alpine Mastiffs in the Snow," perhaps the germ. of the Great St. Bernard picture.

Of the descriptive and critical passages of the work, we can say but little in praise. They are in the commonest style of gift- book literature, which may almost be said to form a class quite distinct from all other literary efforts. To say nothing, at great length, and in words which give the effect of saying a great deal, is now becoming quite a common art, and every Christmas sees the production of hundreds of works exemplifying it in the highest degree. We will quote a sample of what we mean from the volume before us, and leave our readers to decide for them- selves whether we are unjust in classing it as above :-

" What man of us, or indeed woman, has not sympathised with the

scapegrace terrier Be it over so humble, there's no place like home,' who has been out on the loose,' and come back to his kennel to Lind his supper stolen. He seems to feel the weight of his iniquity, and the comfort of a tub where ho can lay down his tired head in peace. Though the home is humble, it is safe, and if he had only stayed thore, he would have had some supper, however poor. How much to be en- vied is the snail who never knows the temptation of 'straying,' but carries her kennel on the top of her back !"

There seems to be no reason why writing of this style, not even in illustration of any picture in the book, should ever cease. For the rest, we may say that the volume is well bound, and

printed (of course) on superfine paper ; and the woodcut illustra- tions are fairly well done, on the whole.

Certainly, in comparison with the collections of poor stuff of all sorts which are so often issued to young persons at this festive season, this is a reasonable work, with a definite aim fairly carried out. That the writing is mere machine-work is not surprising, as it has evidently only been required to fill out, and give a coherence to the various sketches and studies. And now let us seek to estimate Landseer's true place amongst animal painters. First of all, we see clearly, on thinking over Landseer's pictures, that although he had great range as an animal painter, he achieved by no means the same success with every kind. Un- doubtedly his dogs and his stags are the achievements upon which his enduring fame will last,—" The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner," and "Dignity and Impudence," on the one hand, and "The Challenge," "The Combat," and "The Sanctuary," on

the other. And of these, too, the dog pictures are certainly the finer. The peculiar genius of Landseer, the one spicialitd in

which he has never been even rivalled, was the power he pos- sessed of giving to his canine subjects all the expression of a human personality. The face of the bloodhound in " Suspense " is almost as representative of anxiety and suppressed emotion, as the face of a human being could be, and many other pictures could be quoted in a similar manner. And thus he gained for animal painting a new interest, by connecting it in a manner

which the most superficial could appreciate with human life. Striking as are the analogies in many cases between the breeds, tempers, and characters of animals and those of mankind, Sir

Edwin was the first to discover them, at least upon canvas ; and of the zeal and ability with which he worked this rich field of labour any catalogue of his works will show,—fidelity, courage, dignity, humility, braggardocio, fun, and pathos, are not all these and many other human virtues and failings, to be found engrafted upon the faces of his dogs, and is it not this quasi-humanity which gives to his pictures their greatest charm ? When he deserted this line of country, his hand always comparatively failed him in it he was supreme, the Columbus of the dog's character.

Even here, however, he was very unequal in the power of his pictures, owing, it appears, to us, to an excessive love of anti- thesis ; he carried the humanity of the dog so far, that it occa-

sionally jarred upon you, as if the animal had been dressed up for exhibition and escaped from a neighbouring circus. And in many of his pictures there is an excessive fiddling upon the same (string, which becomes wearisome. One more remark must be made, which is, that there can be no doubt, humanly speaking, that he was ruined as an artist by his early success and the notice he gained from the aristocracy. For one good animal picture which he painted after he became famous, he probably pro- duced hilf-a-dozen bad portraits, without mentioning such very useless works as "A Dialogue at Waterloo" and "The Queen at Balmoral." As we said at the beginning of this article, it is diffi- cult for art or artists to live in swaddling-clothes, and Landseer for the last thirty years of his life did habitually live in circles where swaddling-clothes are the ordinary raiment. The free, honest nature of the man was obscured almost entirely by a sort of forced gentility, and his art suffered in consequence ; as Mr.

Monkhouse says, he "lost in vigour, but gained in refinement." Unfortunately, refinement, in that sense of the word, is not what an artist wants ; if his art is not refined naturally, the surround- ing influences of Turkey carpets and gold plate will hardly render it so.

It may be doubted, however, whether Landseer ever pos- sessed the stuff of which a great artist is made. He was too prone, as his biographer confesses, to do what he could do easily, and preferred paths where success is assured, to those in which it seemed arduous and uncertain. Such is not the stuff of which great artists are made, or indeed great men of any class, and so it seems to us, that we must content ourselves with placing him in the second order of artists,—those who do some one thing so well that it is almost genius, but not quite. And another great mark of this is, that the classes to whom Landseer gives most pleasure arc almost invariably women and children, that is, those in whom the sentimental element is most predominant, and the judging faculty most in abeyance. Pure and kindly sentin;Lent all his works possess, without a coarse or an unmanly feeling throughout the list, and occa- sionally, as in the pictures we have referred to, he rises into true pathos, and paints a picture like that of the old shepherd's dog mourning for his master, which strikes home to every one of us as alike true and beautiful. That this humour and pathos are frequently strained till they becomes unnatural, and even more, morbid, is but the inevitable result of working any style of painting or subject threadbare ; and his comparative failure in portrait and large compositions, must be, no doubt, attributed to the fact that after the first years of boyhood, his social life left him few opportunities of steadfast work for improvement rather than favour.