Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, R.A.

From an album of sketches by Landseer, Wilkie and Count D'Orsay compiled by Lady Ida Louisa Tankerville, daughter of Charles, 6th Earl of Tankerville and wife of John William, 13th Earl of Dalhousie;
Thence by descent to her grandson David Ramsay, by whom sold Christie's, 11 July 1962, lot 23;
Bought from Christie's by Dr Theodore Besterman who broke up the sketchbook and sold this drawing to Thomas Agnew & Son, where bought by Sir David Scott in 1973

London, Thomas Agnew and Sons, 100th Annual Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, January-February 1973, no. 192

These two redoubtable characters give the lie to the thought that a new all-pervasive morality immediately gripped England during the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria.  Here both sitters are caught standing in a doorway listening perhaps to an amateur recital.  We meet Lord Alveney and Mrs Norton as if figures from one of Trollope's novels.  The first, a famous libertine and man of the turf whose giddy life dissipated his father's carefully acquired fortune; the second, the mistress of Lord Melbourne and authoress.  Both managed to maintain their position in society but some sense of the strain of this is caught by Landseer's quickly flowing pen.

We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in cataloguing this lot.