A to Z of artists Landseer, Sir Edwin 1802 - 1873

Born in London, the son of the engraver John Landseer, young Edwin started to show his extraordinary gifts even as a six-year-old, sketching animals in the then country around Finchley Road. By 1814 he was etching his own drawings while learning to paint in oils. The following year he exhibited a painting of a Pointer, Bitch, Puppy and Mule at the Royal Academy. He entered the Academy Schools, and in 1818 his first important picture, Fighting Dogs Getting Wind, shown at the Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours, was bought by the arbiter of taste in art matters, Sir George Beaumont. Edwin Landseer had ‘arrived’ at the age of sixteen. At the minimum age of twenty-four he was elected an Associate of the Academy becoming a full Academician five years later. In 1827 he had bought 1, St John’s Wood Road with a barn which he converted to a studio, and where he remained until he died. Through his good looks, appealing nature and undoubted ability, Landseer attracted Royal and aristocratic patrons. He was not without detractors: John Ruskin was a sometime critic, and the purchase price of his most celebrated painting, The Monarch of the Glen, intended for the refreshment rooms of the House of Lords, was turned down in the Commons. Knighted in 1850, over 270 of his works were exhibited at the Academy and British Institution during his lifetime, with many of his paintings being engraved. His modelling of the four lions in Trafalgar Square is a lasting reminder of his pre-eminent position in the fashionable world during the life of Queen Victoria, an ardent admirer. His later mercurial temperament and bouts of depression became more and more pronounced towards the end of his life. He died at St John’s Wood on 1 October 1873 and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.