![]() ![]() Louisa had been in love with Landseer and for the balance of his life remained an intimate friend. Louisa Mackenzie was the daughter of a Scottish landowner who in 1858 became the second wife of William Baring, second Baron Ashburton, whose family owned the Rubens. Landseer’s many skills did not extend to capturing figures in motion, and his composition, like Rubens’s, is given life by the vicious snarling animals in the foreground. Many motifs from Rubens’s picture, notably the rough types at the center and the figure in red at the extreme left, were filtered through into Landseer’s medieval Scottish hunt scene. He depended much on the example of Rubens, whose work he had copied with bravado, and on a light touch combined with exacting accuracy of color and detail. ![]() While the former is an animal and seigneurial portrait of the sort that would become Landseer’s specialty, the latter was something highly unusual for the young artist, a romantic evocation of Scottish late medieval border history inspired by Sir Walter Scott. Landseer first visited Scotland in 1824, and either that summer or the next, the Duke of Atholl commissioned Death of the Stag in Glen Tilt (Blair Charitable Trust, Blair Castle) and the Duke of Bedford thereafter ordered The Hunting of Chevy Chase. Landseer referred to this copy after Rubens when preparing his first major history piece, The Hunting of Chevy Chase (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1826. The dealer John Smith had brought the picture to England from Paris in 1820 and sold it to Alexander Baring, later first Lord Ashburton, in 1824. It seems likely that over the winter of 1824–25, Landseer copied Wolf and Fox Hunt, now attributed to Rubens with the participation of his workshop (The Met, 10.73). Apparently the precocious Landseer’s practice as a young man was to make copies after the old masters: his estate sale lists studies after Ter Borch, De Hooch, and Steen, as well as two after Rubens. His images circulated widely as engravings, and his painting of a stag, The Monarch of the Glen (private collection), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, became the most famous of all images of the Scottish Highlands. Much admired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and knighted in 1850, he was then Britain's most famous artist. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1826 and a full academician in 1831. He died in London on 22 July 1879, leaving 10,000 guineas to the Royal Academy to fund scholarships.Landseer began making animal studies as a small boy and although later known as the English Snyders, he was more than one of England's most gifted sporting artists: without betraying their natures, he was able to use animals to comment on complex social and historical issues. While under Haydon's instruction he also made a series of detailed anatomical drawings. ![]() and his Adherents before the Battle of Edgehill, Clarissa Harlowe in the Prison Room of the Sheriff's Office (1833, now in the collection of the Tate Gallery), The Pillaging of a Jew's House in the Reign of Richard I (1839, Tate Gallery) and The Temptation of Andrew Marvel (1841). His works included The Meeting of Charles I. He paid close attention to the historical accuracy of the accessories and details in his paintings. Most of his pictures were of subjects from British history, or from literature. In 1851, he was appointed Keeper of the Royal Academy, a post requiring him to teach in the "Antique School". He became an associate in of the Royal Academy in 1837, and a full academician in 1845. Many of the drawings he made on the journey were shown at the British Institution in 1828. In 1823 he accompanied Sir Charles Stuart de Rothesay on a diplomatic mission to Portugal and Brazil. He was awarded the silver palette of the Royal Society of Arts for a drawing of Laocoon in 1815, and in 1816 he entered the Royal Academy Schools where he was taught by Henry Fuseli. He trained under his father, and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was born in London on 12 August 1799, the second son of the engraver John Landseer, and the elder brother of the animal painter, Sir Edwin Landseer. ![]() Charles Landseer's Cromwell reading a letter found in Charles's Cabinet, after Naseby Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. ![]()
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