Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was the pre-eminent animal painter of the Victorian age and one of the most celebrated British artists of the nineteenth century. Born in London, the son of the engraver and writer John Landseer, he showed exceptional precocity, exhibiting at the Royal Academy at the age of thirteen and entering the Royal Academy Schools soon afterwards. Encouraged in his youth to study animal anatomy directly, including through dissection, he developed an unusually exact understanding of animal form that underpins even his most dramatic and sentimental compositions. He was elected a full Royal Academician in 1831 at the age of twenty-nine, remarkably young for the honour, and was knighted in 1850.
Landseer became a particular favourite of Queen Victoria from 1836 onwards, painting portraits of the royal family and their pets alongside the deer, dogs and Highland subjects for which he remains best known. His paintings, including The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner and Dignity and Impudence, combine acute observation of animal anatomy with a moralising, often sentimental narrative sensibility that appealed strongly to Victorian taste, though it later contributed to a decline in his critical reputation during the twentieth century. His most famous single work, The Monarch of the Glen, painted around 1851 as part of a commission for the Palace of Westminster, became one of the best-loved images of the nineteenth century, reproduced endlessly on everything from whisky bottles to biscuit tins, and its purchase for the National Galleries of Scotland in 2017 was treated as a major event in British public collecting. Landseer's numerous visits to the Scottish Highlands, where he found many of his most celebrated subjects, also drew criticism in his own time from those who objected to his frequent depictions of deer-hunting. Beyond painting, Landseer undertook his only major sculptural commission in 1858, the four bronze lions for the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, cast from cannon captured at the Battle of Trafalgar and unveiled in 1867; despite having no previous experience as a sculptor, the lions became, and remain, among the most recognisable public monuments in London. Landseer's health declined in his final years, and he died in London in 1873; his funeral drew large crowds, and flags across the city were lowered in his memory.
The painting by Landseer held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a study of a stag, connects directly to the animal subjects, and in particular the Highland deer studies, for which he remains most celebrated. As one of the most historically significant British animal painters, and the creator of two of London's most familiar public images, Landseer occupies a distinctive place among the gallery's holdings of nineteenth-century British art.