Resurrection of a Sentimentalist

By ROBERT HUGHES

Edwin Landseer, seen afresh, had wallop with the pathos

Twenty-five years ago, everyone knew Sir Edwin Landseer was as dead as a shot stag--dispatched, as it were, by the bullets of postimpressionism and "significant form." Even ten years ago, the idea that a major museum might commit itself to a resurrection of his work would have seemed, if not absurd, at least improbable. Realist revivals were one thing--but Landseer? Yet here he is, in an exhibit that opened last month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will go on to London's Tate Gallery in early 1982. And he has been restored with great care, at much expense, in all his Victorian gloss and tearjerking bluffness. One hears again the squalling pibroch and the coarse jests of whisky millionaires tramping the heather. In this microcosm of gillies and grouse feathers, one is made to see as much moral pathos licked into the pink eye of a rabbit as is pulled by most other Victorian painters from the last act of Romeo and Juliet. It is, to put it mildly, quite an experience.

When Landseer died, mad and alcoholic, in 1873, people closed their shops and waited on the London pavements for his cortege to pass by. Flags went to half-staff, and mourning wreaths were placed in the mouths of the four bronze lions which, a few years before, he had sculpted for the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. He was buried in St. Paul's, and his monument bears a stone copy of one of his best-known paintings, an image recognizable to thousands of people who probably could not have identified a Turner, a Blake or even a Constable: The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, a grief-stricken collie resting its head on its master's coffin.

Artists had drawn animals, of course, since the bisons of Lascaux. But Landseer was the only painter who ever became a court favorite and a national culture hero by painting dogs. He painted other creatures too--ptarmigans and parrots, monkeys, cats, horses, cattle and, especially, deer; there was a time when no cottage parlor or country hall lacked its framed print of Landseer's defiant twelve-point stag, The Monarch of the Glen.

He also painted people, and his fussy, glass-smooth portraits of his royal patrons, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, are among the most obsequious images of British royalty ever done by a court artist.

But the dogs made him. Sometimes they were royal dogs, like Victoria's 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.

In paintings like Dignity and Impudence, circa 1839, he projected Victorian ideas about social hierarchy and decorum onto animals--partly to satirize human behavior (though very lightly), and mainly to suggest that the divisions of the Victorian world were rooted in the natural order. Art may be the ape of nature; but dogs, so to 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.

But 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 conflict speak directly, uninflected by sentiment, he produced one of the great images of his century, The Challenge, 1844: a stag bellowing defiance at its swimming enemy in the glacial boneyard of a mountain landscape. Such a painting makes all the dewy-eyed spaniels bearable, if not worthwhile.

--By Robert Hughes

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