I have always intended to use this blog as a platform for artworks, and as a way or recording my progress as I strive to increase my art prowess. Thus I set myself a task - that I will write about art at least once a week and do a bit on a piece of my own also at least once a week.
This week, I'm going to do Landseer, because I picked an artist at random.
Just a brief look at his Wikipedia page will give you the bare bones of his biography and a couple of his more famous paintings. A little more Google-fu and you can see his less famous ones. I like these better. Olga's Gallery has a selection of more of them, my favourites of these being The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which just about brought tears to my eyes, such is the pathos of the subject, and Jocko With A Hedgehog, which cheered me up again. The man was a really good observer of animals, and they way they move and sit. Discussion below the link.
I'm an animal-lover. Landseer did paintings for animal lovers. It's hand in hand really. But, as with so many things, Landseer's work isn't only what it looks like. Properly in context, it's a few other things. (I believe that I have also heard one of my friends, who shall remain nameless, as saying " I don't see the point in painting like these, everyone knows what dogs and mountains look like, you can just go and look at them.")
Landseer was active in the 19th century. He painted the kind of things that people liked back then. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, more and more people craved for simple, rural pleasures, and artworks typically filled that void for those that could afford them. Romanticised versions of English and particularly Scottish countryside scenes were hugely popular, and there were a number of painters that almost specialized in them, Landseer being one of them. Sir Walter Scott had romanticised "the clans and glens of Scotland", the Royal Family hung out at Glamis, Scone, St. Andrews and particularly Balmoral, all scenic places, and tartanry became fashionable, so Scotland was a great subject for a painter.
Landseer's work also frequently features devoted pet animals (see The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner), or working animals that love their masters (Shoeing - look at the expressions on the animals as they watch the man). This was a beloved theme in 19th English artwork, and Landseer was both prolific and good at it.
It's actually revealing about the character of the times. The perception was that hard work = godliness, and that rural work was hard work. While labourers of all sorts in all countries were viewed like this, rural labour was seen as cleaner and more honest, with healthy, bracing fresh air and a salt-of-the-earth attitude, and concurrent with the pro-English attitude of England in the time, British labourers were even more hearty, content and bluff. With the Romanticisation of Scotland, came the idea that we were 'noble savages' - the population of Scotland at that time was primarily rural, primarily little-educated, and not wealthy by the standards of the modernizing cities and they wealth generated by new industry. Thus, the Scottish people were seen as backwards, simple, poor, hardworking and spiritually untainted by the 'wickednesses of modern life'. Thus, the paintings of Landseer hit that fashionable note of rustic simplicity with their focus on 'the glorious wild', the wildlife that represented the abundance of nature that people seemed to yearn for (The Monarch of the Glen), and shabby people with dark homes and poor clothing that nonetheless are happy and virtuous in their poverty (A Highland Breakfast).
One could even go further than that, if one were partisan on the subject, and observe that to glorify the position of those in poverty as actually happier than most with money is a colonial attitude, that the patronising re-imagining of the poverty of those 'under the thumb' of the wealthy as virtuous is essentially the comfort that masters of slaves afford themselves whenever they wonder about ethics, and that Landseer's consistent theme of the devotion of animals to their owners is a reflection of the theory popular in the 19th century that all of the world was God-given to mankind to conquer and own, that man was the pinnacle of creation and that all was subordinate to him (and particularly, wealthy English businessmen). In short, the work of Landseer is an excellent depiction of the English attitude to the world in the Victorian era, a historical document providing an insight to the times.
This week, I'm going to do Landseer, because I picked an artist at random.
Just a brief look at his Wikipedia page will give you the bare bones of his biography and a couple of his more famous paintings. A little more Google-fu and you can see his less famous ones. I like these better. Olga's Gallery has a selection of more of them, my favourites of these being The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, which just about brought tears to my eyes, such is the pathos of the subject, and Jocko With A Hedgehog, which cheered me up again. The man was a really good observer of animals, and they way they move and sit. Discussion below the link.
I'm an animal-lover. Landseer did paintings for animal lovers. It's hand in hand really. But, as with so many things, Landseer's work isn't only what it looks like. Properly in context, it's a few other things. (I believe that I have also heard one of my friends, who shall remain nameless, as saying " I don't see the point in painting like these, everyone knows what dogs and mountains look like, you can just go and look at them.")
Landseer was active in the 19th century. He painted the kind of things that people liked back then. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, more and more people craved for simple, rural pleasures, and artworks typically filled that void for those that could afford them. Romanticised versions of English and particularly Scottish countryside scenes were hugely popular, and there were a number of painters that almost specialized in them, Landseer being one of them. Sir Walter Scott had romanticised "the clans and glens of Scotland", the Royal Family hung out at Glamis, Scone, St. Andrews and particularly Balmoral, all scenic places, and tartanry became fashionable, so Scotland was a great subject for a painter.
Landseer's work also frequently features devoted pet animals (see The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner), or working animals that love their masters (Shoeing - look at the expressions on the animals as they watch the man). This was a beloved theme in 19th English artwork, and Landseer was both prolific and good at it.
It's actually revealing about the character of the times. The perception was that hard work = godliness, and that rural work was hard work. While labourers of all sorts in all countries were viewed like this, rural labour was seen as cleaner and more honest, with healthy, bracing fresh air and a salt-of-the-earth attitude, and concurrent with the pro-English attitude of England in the time, British labourers were even more hearty, content and bluff. With the Romanticisation of Scotland, came the idea that we were 'noble savages' - the population of Scotland at that time was primarily rural, primarily little-educated, and not wealthy by the standards of the modernizing cities and they wealth generated by new industry. Thus, the Scottish people were seen as backwards, simple, poor, hardworking and spiritually untainted by the 'wickednesses of modern life'. Thus, the paintings of Landseer hit that fashionable note of rustic simplicity with their focus on 'the glorious wild', the wildlife that represented the abundance of nature that people seemed to yearn for (The Monarch of the Glen), and shabby people with dark homes and poor clothing that nonetheless are happy and virtuous in their poverty (A Highland Breakfast).
One could even go further than that, if one were partisan on the subject, and observe that to glorify the position of those in poverty as actually happier than most with money is a colonial attitude, that the patronising re-imagining of the poverty of those 'under the thumb' of the wealthy as virtuous is essentially the comfort that masters of slaves afford themselves whenever they wonder about ethics, and that Landseer's consistent theme of the devotion of animals to their owners is a reflection of the theory popular in the 19th century that all of the world was God-given to mankind to conquer and own, that man was the pinnacle of creation and that all was subordinate to him (and particularly, wealthy English businessmen). In short, the work of Landseer is an excellent depiction of the English attitude to the world in the Victorian era, a historical document providing an insight to the times.
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