As soon as I saw the opportunity to apply for an Aberdeen Art Gallery micro-commission, I knew I had to put myself forward and I knew exactly what piece I wanted to write about.
Edwin Landseer’s painting ‘Flood in the Highlands’ has always been a favourite of mine. My Grandma used to take me to the Art Gallery when I was young and it was always the painting I would want to look at.
The painting itself is very bleak, as the title suggests, it depicts a flash flood that devastated the valleys at the foot of the Cairngorms and Monadhliath mountains on 3-4 August 1829. As a child, I would always count the animals or notice something I hadn’t seen before, in fact, I’m still noticing new things to this day.
Sir Edwin Landseer was one of the most popular romantic painters working in Britain during the early 19th century. Most people will know him from his work ‘Monarch of the Glen’ which shows a brilliant, beautiful stag in the Highlands
The painting and variations of it are now commonly used in advertising for soup, shortbread and whisky.
‘Monarch of the Glen’ stag is regularly used on Scottish produce
Born in to an artistic family, Landseer was something of a child protégé, he began painting at the age of four and was ambidextrous. It’s rumoured he was able to paint a horse’s head and its tail at the same time!
Due to his brilliance, Landseer was a firm favourite with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He would often instruct Queen Victoria on sketching and spent a great deal of time in the Highlands with them over the years.
At the age of just eighteen, Landseer was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of Bedford and was commissioned by the Duke to paint a portrait of wife Georgina, Duchess of Bedford.
This inevitably meant that Georgina and Landseer needed to spend a lot of time together and despite her being twenty-one years his senior, the two embarked on an affair. Their courtship was one that was captured in art rather than in letters and their relationship is documented in dozens of intimate sketches.
(Notice how exposed Georgina is in this sketch).
In 1825 Georgina fell pregnant with her tenth and last child. Rumours were rife that the child was Landseer’s, however, once the child (Rachel) was born, the Duke of Bedford treated her as if she was his own.
Although it suited Georgina for her daughter to be treated as the Duke’s child, after all, it gave her the social status and all that came with it, there is an indication that Landseer wasn’t at all happy with the situation and that he felt cheated out of his lover and his child.
In one poem he writes:
‘I heard that some great man had been
And cheated me through thick and thin of what I thought my own.’
Some critics believe that one of Landseer’s most famous child portraits, ‘A Naughty Child’ was modelled on Lady Rachel Russell (his illegitimate child).
Can you see a family resemblance?
Despite Landseer’s feelings, the Duke and Duchess never considered divorcing and Georgina appears to have enjoyed having both Landseer and the Duke in her life for a number of years.
Following the Duke’s death in 1839, Landseer proposed to Georgina in the spring of 1840. She turned him down. Whether this is because she didn’t want to lose her social status or whether she preferred Landseer as a lover and not a husband is debatable. Whatever the reason, the effect on Landseer was severe and by the end of 1840 he suffered from what only can be described now as a nervous breakdown.
It appears that Georgina really was the love of Landseer’s life. He never married and for years, even after her death, he suffered terribly from depression, loneliness, anxiety, paranoia and insecurity. This only intensified as he became more and more dependent on alcohol and drugs.
For someone so brilliantly gifted, his life ended as a lonely figure. In July 1872 and at the request of his family, Landseer was declared insane and he was committed to an asylum.
After his death in 1873, many pictures of Georgina and Lady Rachel were found in his private collection.
Since researching Sir Edwin Landseer for the Art Gallery micro-commission it has added an extra dimension to how I view his work. The deterioration in his mental health is something that I think many people can relate to. Years may have passed and circumstances may have changed but loneliness, heartache and depression are universal human traits that all of us have experienced at one point or another.
