Ian Brunskill - The Times Great Victorian Lives

His first appearance, however, as a painter dates from 1815, when, at the age of 13, he exhibited two paintings at the Academy; they are entered in the catalogue as Nos. 443 and 584; ‘Portrait of a Mule’ and ‘Portraits of a Pointer Bitch and Puppy,’ and the young painter appears as: Master E. Landseer,33, Foley-street. In the following year he was one of the exhibitors at ‘the Great Room in Spring-gardens,’ then engaged for ‘the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours,’ along with De Wint, Chalon, and the elder Pugin; about the same time, too, we find him receiving regular instruction in art as a pupil in the studio of Haydon, and the residence of the family in Foley-street was the very centre of a colony of artists and literary celebrities. Mulready, Stothard, Benjamin West, A. E. Chalon, Collins, Constable, Daniel, Flaxman, and Thomas Campbell all lived within a few hundred yards of John Landseer’s house; and from their society young Landseer, we may be sure, took care to draw profit and encouragement. He also derived considerable assistance from a study of the Elgin marbles at Burlington-house, where they lay for some time before finding a home in the British Museum. These ancient treasures he was led to study by the advice of his teacher Haydon. In the same year (1816) he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy. In the following year he exhibited ‘Brutus, a portrait of a Mastiff,’ at the Academy, and also a ‘Portrait of an Alpine Mastiff;’ at the Gallery in Spring-gardens already mentioned.

With the year 1818 commenced an important epoch in the life of Landseer. His ‘Fighting Dogs Getting Wind,’ exhibited this summer at the rooms of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours, excited an extraordinary amount of attention; and, being purchased by Sir George Beaumont, it set the stream of fashion in his favour. Sir David Wilkie, writing to Haydon at this date, remarked, as much in earnest as in jest, ‘Young Landseer’s jackasses are good.’

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