Edwin Henry Landseer Paintings
1802 - 1873 Painter, Sculptor, Etcher, Animalier, England, Victorian Neoclassicism
Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals, 1839
Oil on canvas, 44 3/8 x 68 7/8 inches (113 x 175 cm)
Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, London Animals & Hunting Scenes Paintings
Landseer was greatly admired as a painter of animals and to a certain degree his reputation rests on such pictures. Indeed, it was as an animal painter that he first came to the attention of Queen Victoria in 1836. Landseer's particular skills lay not just in accurate drawing (based on his early experience of dissection) and a convincing rendering of the characteristics of animals, but also in his ability to incorporate them into compositions. This was done in such a way that their presence often buttressed the narrative - if it was not historical - with a moralising or allegorical dimension.
An important compositional feature of the painting " Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals " is the positioning of the viewer inside the cage with the Spectators visible through the bars. Van Amburgh reclines in the cage surrounded by a tiger, a lion, a lioness and two leopards. He wears a coat of mail, presumably not as a form of protection but perhaps, judging by the footwear, as a form of costume (part Roman and part medieval). There are scratches on the skin of his right forearm and on his neck. The sheen on the coats of the animals reveals Landseer's superb technique, as in the balance between the underpaint and the highlight on the lioness, or the spots visible beneath the top layer of paint on the two leopards. Next to Van Amburgh is a lamb which no doubt heightened the drama of the performance, but it might also be seen as a biblical reference, as in the late work The Lion and the Lamb of 1871 br>
The lion behind Isaac van Amburgh brings to mind the four bronze lions that were commissioned from Landseer towards the end of his life for the base of Nelson's col- umn in Trafalgar Square. The original commission was given to Landseer in 1857, but it preoccupied him for ten years and the lions were unveiled in January 1867.
