Art: The Great Worst Painter

Britain’s Royal Academy had spent four years assembling the big exhibition, and among the lenders was Queen Elizabeth herself. The artist on view was Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., whose sentimental canvases made him one of the most successful painters of the 19th century. Reversing this judgment, the 20th century has found him monumentally mawkish, and in rehabilitating him with an elaborate show, the academy seemed to be asking: Was Sir Edwin really as bad as all that? The answer: “Yes!”

Born in 1802, Landseer was certainly one of the most prodigious of child prodigies’. At twelve, he became the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the academy. He grew up to be a small, handsome man whose head, Painter John Constable sourly noted, was “beautifully decorated with a thousand curls.” He was accepted in all the best houses, and was a favorite of Queen Victoria, who at one time owned no fewer than 39 of his oils. But though his youthful work still shows a certain delicacy of touch, things began to change when he was in his late 30s.

For one thing, he was so anxious to please Victoria’s consort, the German Prince Albert, that his paintings took on the dead, glassy surface favored by the Germans. From then on, everything about his work degenerated. His famous Monarch of the Glen—a postcard stag perched upon an improbable peak—was painted for the refreshment room of the House of Lords, but Commons, in its homely wisdom, never got around to voting the money. His Dignity and Impudence is a coyly saccharine affair showing a drooping bloodhound trying to be oblivious to a cocky terrier sharing his kennel. And when he painted the Queen and the prince smugly relaxing after a hunt while a little princess royal frolics in a clutter of dead birds, he produced perhaps the most tasteless of all royal portraits. But it was not only his Victorian smugness that caused his failure. Said Critic Eric Newton in the Manchester Guardian: “He was not a good enough painter.” He was, added the more acid Geoffrey Grigson of the Observer, “the Great Worst Painter (and Richest Painter) in the whole bad history of the Academy.”

Even the most generous critics agreed that it would have been better for the prestige of British art if Landseer had died young. Yet that was a grace that was denied him. In 1839. when his love of 16 years, the recently widowed Duchess of Bedford, refused to marry him, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and when she died, he went quite balmy. He was at times homicidal (once he nearly killed the duchess’ daughter by unceremoniously sitting on her chest as she lay abed with bronchitis). But he lived and painted on and on, dying at 71, to leave behind some of the most embarrassing pictures ever painted—and, as the Observer noted, one sadly memorable line about himself. “If people only knew as much about painting as I do,” he said, “they would never buy my pictures.”