Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, R.A.

Despite building his career and subsequent reputation on depictions of the Scottish Highlands, pure landscape works by Sir Edwin Landseer are relatively uncommon. Landseer painted works such as this, it would seem, entirely for his own pleasure.¹ They (with this work amongst them) tend to date from between 1825–1835, and a large proportion are Highland scenes. Such was the personal nature of these sketches, that Landseer practically never exhibited them. Rather, most were seen for the first time when the contents of his studio were sold at his posthumous sale in 1874. The present painting’s provenance can be traced to this sale, and by extension, to Landseer’s studio.²

This picture’s rarity is increased when we consider that Landseer very seldom included figures in these landscape studies. Present here are two ghillies, one standing, the other sitting in a wooden rowing boat at the loch’s edge. The boat and the immediate foreground belie the rapid execution of the painting. Incisive pencil strokes are discernible against the confident and impulsive brushwork of the banks and mountainsides. Landseer adds a third variation to the picture’s surface finish, rendering the lake and the black storm cloud in thin glazes. This is an effect replicated across a breadth of similar landscape studies by the artist such as A Lake Scene: Effect of a Storm (1833) and Encampment on Loch Avon (1833).³ Both of these pictures commune with the present work, especially in how the rough handling of the rugged shore offsets the glassy water surface. In doing this, Landseer demonstrates multiple painterly techniques in a single painting.

Unlike Landseer’s larger commissioned works, the figures present here count only as staffage amongst the work’s true subject: Scotland’s monumental scenery. It is possible that the painting might depict a view of Loch Laggan, where the Dukes of Abercorn leased Ardverikie House, on the banks of the loch, as a hunting lodge. Abercorn was an early exponent of the emerging sport of deer stalking and a keen patron of Landseer's, who was a frequent visitor to the house. He also served as Groom of the Stole to Prince Albert and it was as Abercorn's guests that Queen Victoria and the Prince spent three weeks at Ardverikie in the late summer of 1847, preceding their purchase of Balmoral the following year. Before it was devastated by fire in 1873, many of the walls of Ardverikie House were covered in murals by Landseer, painted during his numerous stays. This work was surely painted outdoors; in order to commit such fleeting atmospheric conditions to paint, the artist must have experienced them for himself. That pictures of this type are almost exclusively painted on board lends credence to this.

Many such works were painted by Landseer as he sought to withdraw from the dictates of polite company and large commissioned works. In 1833 he spent much time travelling and painting with Georgiana Russell, Duchess of Bedford, with whom he had begun an affair in 1823. The pair would frequent Highland huts built as retreats by the Duchess. Landseer recorded one shelter’s appearance in Exterior of the Duchess of Bedford’s Hut at Glenfeshie, its romantic, remote location certainly permeating the mood of the painting offered here.⁴

¹ For sustained discussion of Landseer’s landscapes, see R. Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer, London 1981, pp. 87–93.

² See under Provenance.

³ Ormond 1981, pp. 88–89, nos 44 and 45.

⁴ Ormond 1981, p. 91, no. 49.