The beauty of cruelty

Julian Treuherz reviews an exhibition in Edinburgh that present to views Landseer at his superlative best--in the Highlands,

Landseer was single of the most successful of all nineteenth-century artists, at the same time he is still regarded with a certain number of distaste. His name calls to mind cheap chromolithographs of The Stag at Bay, that cliche of the seaside lodging house, whilst his penchant for gory sporting views slavering dogs and heaps of dead game lays off the squeamish (and the animal rights supporter).

That this impression still lingers is to be paid to over-familiarity through cheap reproduction. Landseer was individual of the first artists to allow his works to be widely disseminated from one side the then new medium of carburet of iron engraving. Prints after his work can still be take delight ined as marvels of skill in translating oils into black and white lines, on the contrary the popularity of these images l to smooth cheaper forms of mass reproduction. Sadly, these negated the quality of the originals--their grand scale, their weft and their sheer emotional force. Take The Monarch of the dingle for instance, the painting that accommodate withs its title to this exhibition. Seeing it miniaturised upon the label of a Dewar's whisky bottle completely razes everything that gives the painting its power. In the exhibition it is rightly hung high, with equal reason that the proud stag, above life size, towers above the viewer and dominates the dizzying landscape of misty peaks in the background. The grandeur and size of the original, combined with the convincing illusion of a living and breathing animal, gives the painting an epic quality.

The stately Landseer exhibition mounted in 1981 in Philadelphia and London revealed the artist's strengths--his astonishing technical virtuosity in painting animals and landscape, and his ability to bear the power, cruelty and beauty of untamed nature. notwithstanding it also exposed his principal weakness, the trite subdue matter seen in the pictures of animals endowed with arch human expressions. The Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands is the first major Landseer exhibition held since then, and the first at any time held in Scotland, surprising in view of the importance of Scotland to his art. It overspreads a lot of the same loam as the 1981 show. Richard Ormond curated the pair there are many pictures in belonging to all between both exhibitions and the beautifully produc catalogue repeats a certain number of of the same material, although a fascinating fresh essay by T.C. Smout gives us a historian's view of the social and economic background that shaped Landseer's art.

The concentration upon Landseer's Scottish subjects has the fortunate event of allowing the organisers to leave on the outside the silliest of the dog pictures. solitary Comical Dogs, a parody of an somewhat advanced in life married couple, one wearing a notch bonnet, the other in an advanced in years lady's cap and smoking a pipe, exhibits this aspect of Landseer's work. It gazes forced compared with the other canine genre paintings seen here, of the like kind as The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, a faithful dog grieving at his master's coffin, and A Highland Breakfast, showing a mother suckling her child, whilst a cluster of dogs feed from a tub the one and the other are set in beautifully evok Highland cottages with skilfully painted still-life details like as earthenware pots and simple made of wood furniture, showing the artist's careful inquiry of seventeenth-century Dutch peasant interiors. The precision of observation precludes these subjects from descending into sentimentality; the couple pictures show Landseer's ability to waft feelings--grief and maternal love respectively--with sensitivity and delicacy.

Many of these cottage pageants were done for English patrons, businessmen of that kind as William Wells or John Sheepshanks, who wanted art that appealed to the imagination and taught moral tasks But Landseer's first patrons were aristocratic landowners of that kind as the Duke of Atholl, known as 'the greatest deer-killer in Scotland', who commissioned grand sporting paintings in the tradition of Snyder Rubens and Desportes. Landseer was also affected by dint of the fashion for setting this mark of subject in the 'olden time', portraying his patrons in historical dres Olden-time make subordinates are usually idealised and nostalgic affairs, on the contrary Landseer's Hawking in the old Time, depicting a hawk and a heron fasteninged in aerial combat, is quite astonishing. It combines brutishness and beauty with a troubling ambiguity that step quicklys through Landseer's art. This is confirmed by dint of his statement in a alphabetic character to Lord Ellesmere, 'Who does not glory in the death of a fine stag? when in truth he ought to be ashamed of the assassination.'

Following upon from these grand sporting controls Landseer developed his most original creations, the series of stag paintings. The central space at the Royal Scottish Academy has been used to great issue to house a group of them. In The Monarch of the valley The Sanctuary, A Random discharge and Coming Events Cast their Shadows Before, Landseer, many times thought of as typically Victorian, exhibits himself to be a actual child of the romantic change with its appreciation of wild and solitary landscapes and of outermost states, cruelty, violence and ecstasy. As Ormond points on the outside in the catalogue, the elemental feelings about life and death evok in these paintings of solitary stags bear a mood of religious awe. The association with martyrdom is not ever far away. Here Landseer has raised animal painting into high art.