December, I 9 I 8
THE LANDSWOMAN
Painters of Wild Animals
Study of a Lion-BY Sm
EDWIN LANDSEER.
NIMAL paint.ing does not seem to have attracted artists
until comparatively modern times. Formerly people were
not interest.ed in animals for their own sakes, and there was no
demand for pictures of them. It is true that the Old Masters
sometimes introduced animals into their historical pictures, but
these were merely accessories, and no cnre was taken to make
them lifelike. They were either copied from older pictures or
evolved out of the artist's imaginat.ion. In "St. Jcromc in the
Desert" there was always a lion, but a very comic lion it sometimes was, the artist havin~;~neither the inclination nor perhaps
the opportunity to paint It direct from Nature.
Rembrandt made his first studies of lions from Nature when a
travelling menagerie passed through Amsterdam about the
middle of the seventeenth century, and at this time several
Dutch artists were already painting animals. Cuyp, Paul
Potter and Karel du Jnrdin were among the number, but they
confined their art to sheep, cattle, and the other domestic
anima-ls.
In England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the majority of artists were ''face painters," or "portrait pnintere," as we should call t,hem now. Few of them attempted
landscape, except as a background to their pictures, and a horse
or a dog, introduced into a portrait, was the only animal they
ever thought of painting. Yet opportunities for painting wild
animals had not been lacking since quite an early date. The
first menagerie that we hear of belonged to Henry I., who had
some lions and leopards at Woodstock. These were afterwards
removed to the Tower of London, where they were acces•ible
to the public. The Tower Menagerie remained in existence until
182R, the year when the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park
A
were openE>.d.
George Stubbs, our first great animal painter, of whom we
gave some account in the September number of THE LANDSWOMAN, was alfo the first artist, so far as we know, to take
ad vantage of the presence of lions in the Tower. Re went there
frequently, and made numerous studies of them in different
attitudes. He was fortunate also in having another model, a
Nation'!l Gallery.
lion which was kept in a cage m a ccrner of Lord Shelbourne's
garden at Hounslow Heath. This auimal's temper was continually roused at the sight of people passing along the gravel
path in front of its cage, and this gave Stubbs his chance. "A
Horse Fri~htened by a Lion" was a favourite subject, which he
repeated several times. He is said, moreover, to have seen, when
on a vis1t to Ceuta, in Morocco, an attack by a lion on a horse.
Re also painted "Lion and Dead Tiger" and " Horse and
Lioness," which are both in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool; "Lion Devouring a Stag," ''Lion Devouring a Horse,"'
"Tigers at Play," and many others.
Besides the Tower, the only other place where wild animals
could be seen altve in London was the menagerie at Exeter
'Change, in the Strand, where Exeter Hall recently stood. It is
not known when· this was started, but it was probably after 1773,
as it is not mentioned in a llwtory of Lowlon pul:lished in that
year. The Exeter 'Change Menagene was run successively by
Pidcock, Polito, and Edward Cross, and in 1828 the animals were
transferred from the Strand to the King's Mew• in Trafalgar
Square, on the site now occupied by the N ationa.l Gallery. It
is to the presence of Cross's Menagerie in London that we owe
the beautiful picture, "Two I.eopards," by Jacques Laurent
Agasse, which waneprodur·edin The Connoisseur for Allgust.,l916.
Although a Swiss by birth, Agasse may almost be counted
among the English artists, for most of his work was done here.
Re was born in Geneva, and as a child amused him'flf by cutting
out. silhouettes of animals, and copying the coloured plates in
Buffon's Natural Hwtory. Re came to London at the age of
thirty-three, and spent the rest of his life. nearly fifty years, in
this country. He lived for a time at Paddington Green, where
he was near the open fields and the cattle X\