3-053-449 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The late Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., 1873. 'We are much indebted to Messrs. Henry Graves and Co., for their permission to copy the Portrait painted [Sir Edwin] and engraved by Mr. Samuel Cousins, R.A. [Landseer is most known for modelling the lions in Trafalgar Square in London. His] father set young Edwin, from his very earliest age, to study direct from nature, sending him to Hampstead-heath...to make studies of donkeys, sheep, and goats. There are few instances of precocity so remarkable, the promise of which has been so fully kept. Little Edwin drew animals well even before he was five years old...When twelve years old he won the silver Isis medal of the Society of Arts for a drawing of a hunting horse, and at thirteen he was an exhibitor at the Academy...[A] knighthood was conferred in 1850, he was awarded a large gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1855...It remains to add that to the nervous or mental disease under which Sir Edwin succumbed he had been a prey at intervals for many years'. Landseer's death was widely marked in England: shops and houses lowered their blinds, flags flew at half mast, his bronze lions at the base of Nelson's column were hung with wreaths, and large crowds lined the streets to watch his funeral cortege'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.