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Lot Essay
The Monarch of the Glen is one of the most celebrated of all nineteenth century British paintings, and a testament to Landseer’s powers as a great Romantic artist. The artist’s most famous work, it has become an iconic image of the Scottish Highlands: an animal of sublime power and beauty is posed before a misty mountain landscape, monarch of all he surveys. Attention is focussed on the body, head and antlers of the stag, which is brought up close to the picture plane. It is a portrait of a specific animal realised with all Landseer’s deep knowledge of anatomy and his tactile feeling for the textures of muscle, bone and fur. No-one could match such verisimilitude, or charge a deer with such energy and vitality. In the heroic design, there are echoes of works such as Whistlejacket (fig. 1; London, National Gallery), by his great eighteenth century predecessor George Stubbs.
Though rooted in the sporting tradition of British art, Landseer’s picture also reflects wider influences. He was a passionate admirer of seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish art, Rubens and Snyders in particular, whose hunting scenes proved a fruitful source of ideas for themes and compositions (fig. 2). Paulus Potter’s close-up heads of bulls are an obvious precedent for Landseer’s stag. Among contemporary French artists he would certainly have known the work of Gericault (fig. 3) who exhibited the Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Musée de Louvre, Paris) in London in 1821. The French artist praised Landseer’s animal pictures that he saw at the Royal Academy that year. One French artist Landseer is known to have admired is Horace Vernet, whose Mazeppa and the Wolves of 1826 (Rouen, Musée Municipal) echoes the spirited romanticism of Landseer’s early paintings.
The influence was not all one way. Landseer’s prints had been widely circulated in France from the 1830s onwards. At the International Exhibition in Paris in 1855, his pictures blew away the French critics and public. The art critic Théophile Gautier reflected that ‘Landseer gives his beloved animals soul, thought, poetry, and passion. He endows them with an intellectual life almost like our own; he would if he dared, take away their instinct and accord them free will; what worries him is not anatomical exactitude, complicated joints, the thickness of the paint, masterful brushwork: it is the very sprit of the beast, and in this respect there is no painter to match him’ (Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, Paris, 1855, I, pp. 72-7, cited in R. Ormond, op. cit., 1981, p. 31). He was one of the very few foreigners awarded a gold medal in the exhibition. In the wake of this, Rosa Bonheur, the famous French animal painter became a kind of protégé of his, and it is hardly conceivable that Courbet was not aware of Landseer’s deer pictures when painting his own.
The artist’s representation is, in a sense, a fiction, because no human could ever get so close to a living deer in the wild. We have to accept the heroic, emblematic nature of the image rather than question its reality. Landseer celebrates the splendour of the stag, but we must remember that the stag is also a quarry and a potential trophy for the hunter. It is a moot point whether Landseer, a keen sportsman, is viewing this one through a telescope, paint-brush in hand, or through the sights of his rifle. The tension between the two would never be resolved, natural wonder versus hunter’s prey, and such ambivalence underpins all the artist’s great deer subjects.
Not only the stag but the setting is spectacular. The picture captures the freshness of morning in the mountains in a sparkling key, with the sun slowly dissolving the mist. When the picture was first exhibited, at the Royal Academy of 1851, it was accompanied by a poem identified as The Legends of Glenorchay:
When first the day - star’s clear cool light,
Chasing night’s shadows grey,
With silver touched each rocky height
That girded wild Glen-Strae
Uprose the Monarch of the Glen
Majestic from his lair,
Surveyed the scene with piercing ken,
And snuffed the fragrant air.
The forests of Glenorchay belonged to the Marquess of Breadalbane, with whom Landseer often stayed and hunted. However, the rocks in the background are said to be identical with those in Glen Quoich, an estate belonging to the Ellice family, who also hosted the artist, which are still called ‘Landseer’s rocks’.
The Monarch of the Glen belongs to a group of deer paintings from the 1840s painted on a grandiose scale. These include The Sanctuary (c. 1842; London, The Royal Collection), The Challenge (c. 1844; Northumberland, Alnwick Castle), The Stag at Bay (fig. 4; private collection) and A Random Shot (c. 1848; Bury, Bury Art Gallery and Museum). In these works Landseer sought to raise sporting subjects to the level of high art, following in the footsteps of Rubens, Snyders and Oudry. He shows empathy for the quarry as they face death from the hounds and the guns, or occasionally find safety and sanctuary. The never-ending conflict between man and nature is presented in terms of an epic struggle between contending adversaries.
Landseer was no stranger to the Scottish Highlands. He first went there in 1824, visiting Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford and painting the author and his dogs, before going on to Glen Tilt to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, who would become his devoted friends and patrons. In subsequent seasons he often stayed at Glenfeshie in the Cairngorms, where the Duchess and her friends camped out in a remote group of huts. Here Landseer painted narrative scenes, vivid landscape sketches, and deer subjects for which he would become famous, while enjoying life as a sportsman. He was not immune to the poverty and underside of Highland life, witness The Stonebreaker (c. 1830; London, Victoria & Albert Museum) and The Illicit Highland Whisky Still (c. 1829; London, Apsley House), but the Highland clearances find no echo in his work. The introduction of sheep and the development on sporting estates led to the displacement of crofters and clansmen in the 1820s and 1830s, often to be replaced by wealthy southerners coming up to shoot and fish. Landseer would give visual form to their romantic notions of Highland life and sport. He was their artist.
The Monarch of the Glen was originally commissioned as one of three works planned for the Refreshment Room in the House of Lords. The Palace of Westminster had been rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1834, captured memorably by Turner (fig. 5), and many artists had been involved in its subsequent decoration, overseen by the Fine Arts Commission. In 1849, Landseer accepted a commission to decorate three panels in the Refreshment Room for a fee of one thousand guineas. He wrote to Charles Eastlake, the secretary of the Commission, on 24 June 1849: ‘I name this sum without any fixed idea as to the class of subject, which would greatly depend on the scheme for the general embellishment of the apartment. If only three Pictures are placed – rather above the level of the eye, the subjects represented should, I think, be larger’ (Victoria & Albert Museum, Eng MS, 86 M 3, no. 27. The possible placing of the picture on a staircase in the Palace of Westminster is discussed by Eastlake in a letter of 28 July 1851 to Prince Albert [Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, F.31/1]). Landseer later questioned whether a refreshment room was the most appropriate location for his work. The commission was subject to a parliamentary vote and when the Fine Arts Commission estimates came up for review the members voted it down. Landseer had already begun work on the first canvas, which would become The Monarch of the Glen, and he decided to complete it as an easel painting. Its unusual, almost square format was dictated by the proportions of the spaces in the Refreshment Room.
Landseer sent the picture to the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1851. The critic for the Athenaeum wrote: ‘Largeness of scale is now evidently best calculated for the expression of Sir Edwin Landseer’s powers’ … ‘To the freedom and certainty of such language we owe the more than common success of that fine stag, The Monarch of the Glen (112), and of the Group, Geneva (134). The first is a grand exemplification of animal nature in repose’. The art critic of the Art Journal continued in the same vein: 'The Monarch of the Glen is a fine stag that, according to the description of the lines, seems to be testing the quality of the mountain air. The head of the stag is a fine study, it is borne aloft with the proud and graceful bearing natural to the animal. His round and well-conditioned body comes in relief against the sky, below which is a section of mountain scenery'.
Landseer had another twenty years to live following the exhibition of The Monarch of the Glen. Though plagued by neurosis and depression, his powers as an artist remained undiminished to the end. He was kept on the rails and supported by some exceptional friends, who managed his affairs and forgave him his erratic behaviour. Among his late masterpieces are several deer subjects, including The Deer Pass (c. 1852; Wyoming, Jackson, National Museum of Wildlife Art), Night and Morning (c. 1853; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Art Museum), Scene in Braemar (c. 1857; private collection), The Hunted Stag (c. 1859, Fredericton, Beaverbrook Art Gallery) and The Fatal Duel (c. 1861; Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle). Other masterpieces mark out his last decade including The Highland Flood (c. 1860; Aberdeen, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum), Man Proposes, God Disposes (1863-64; Egham, Royal Holloway College), a scene of Arctic disaster, The Swannery Invaded by Eagles (c. 1869; private collection), and the four bronze lions around the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square (1858-66). Following his death in 1873, a six day studio sale was held in these Rooms, and a memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy the following year included over five hundred works. Though his faults were not glossed over, he was praised in contemporary obituaries as the greatest animal painter of his time, and the author of many of the most popular paintings of the nineteenth century. He was accorded a public funeral, before his interment in the crypt of St Paul’s, and, among the many wreaths placed on his coffin, one would have especially touched him: ‘A tribute of Friendship and Admiration for Great Talents. From Queen Victoria’. He had painted the Queen, her family and pets over the course of more than thirty years, and he had been the chief recorder of her life at home in London and in the Highlands (fig. 6). The Queen was the artist’s chief patron, but there many others in the upper ranks of the aristocracy, to name only the Dukes of Abercorn, Atholl, Bedford, Devonshire, Gordon and Northumberland, the Marquesses of Breadalbane and Stafford, and the Earls of Aberdeen, Ellesmere and Tankerville. He had been their servant and devoted friend.
A note on the provenance
The Monarch of the Glen was purchased at the Royal Academy exhibition (or soon afterwards) by Albert Denison, 1st Baron Londesborough (1805-60), a prominent liberal politician, who had inherited a title and a fortune shortly before. He acquired a mansion, Grimston, near Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and set about filling it with works of art. He may well have been involved in the negotiations for the decoration of the Refreshment Room, which would have given him a personal stake in the picture. The Monarch of the Glen was engraved by the artist’s elder brother, Thomas Landseer, and published as a large print by Henry Graves & Co. Three hundred artist’s proofs were sold at ten guineas each and an unlimited number of ordinary prints at three guineas (details of the edition can be found in An Alphabetical List of Engravings Declared at the Office of the Printsellers’ Association, London…Since its Establishment in 1847 to the end of 1891, London, 2 vols., 1892-94, p. 242). The picture was later engraved by George Zobel on a smaller scale. Landseer was the most engraved British artist of the nineteenth century and it was through this medium that his work reached a mass audience.
Following the death in 1883 of Lord Londesborough’s second wife, Lady Fitzgerald, who had by then remarried, the picture came up for sale in these Rooms, where it was bought by the wealthy politician and art collector, Henry William Eaton, 1st Baron Cheylesmore (1816-91), who, amongst other things, owned a superb collection of Landseer’s work. It was sold again at his death to be bought by Thomas James Barratt (1841-1914), who has been described as ‘The Father of Modern Advertising’. As managing director of A. & F. Pears, the soap manufacturers, he promoted his products through modern marketing methods. Amongst his innovations was the employment of works of art in Pears advertisements, most famously Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais, which upset the artist and led to accusations of vulgarity. But it worked and Barratt’s rivals followed his lead, among them Lever Brothers, the company run by Lord Leverhulme at Port Sunlight, which would take over Pears in 1920.
The Monarch of the Glen does not seem to have featured in advertisements but to have formed part of Barratt’s personal collection. Its fame as an advertising icon came with its next owner Sir Thomas Dewar (1864-1930), later Lord Dewar, who together with his older brother John, Lord Forteviot, was responsible for building the family firm into one of Scotland’s largest whisky companies. The picture became inextricably linked to the company as a brand image to be reproduced in countless labels and advertisements (fig. 7). It was not the only picture to be immortalized in this way. Dewar bought two other landmark pictures, Sir Henry Raeburn’s majestic portrait of a Highland chieftain, The McNab (on loan to Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow), and The Thin Red Line by Robert Gibb (on loan to the Scottish National War Museum, Edinburgh), a scene from the Crimean War, and these, too, were deployed in the promotion of whisky. The Monarch of the Glen would in the course of time come to feature as a trademark in the promotion of other products apart from drink, giving it a universal currency. Few other images from the nineteenth century remain so well-known and so popular.
We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Landseer’s Legacy
The Monarch of the Glen resounds across contemporary visual culture. Even as its status as a romantic icon of the Highlands has verged on the ubiquitous – adorning everything from whisky labels and biscuit tins to countless prints and advertisements – the mastery of Landseer’s painting remains clear. Indeed, it was a deep fondness for the original work that led Paul McCartney to commission Peter Blake to create a version of the Monarch in 1966 (fig. 8). Blake’s meticulous interpretation, complete with a distinctive Pop-inflected textual label, pays sensitive homage to Landseer’s silken play of light and form while making a nod to the stag’s place in mass-produced imagery: he was working from a printed reproduction. Indirectly, this artistic encounter would lead to one of the most famed album covers of the century – in 1967 McCartney would commission Blake to design the artwork for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Painting, of course, in a post-abstraction and post-War world, is not looked at in the same light as in Landseer’s time. Gerhard Richter, perhaps the foremost painter of the contemporary era, executed Hirsch (Deer) in 1963 (fig. 9). While not a direct response to Monarch of the Glen, a comparison between the two works is striking. Landseer’s brilliantly atmospheric, sunlit colours are reduced to total grey; Richter’s spectral stag, rather than standing proud above a sublime landscape, is small, furtive and blurred, hiding in a claustrophobic expanse of forest, whose trunks and branches are skeletally outlined in graphic black against a flat grey wash. A detail of this work was used for the cover of the Robert Storr monograph Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (2003), which captures its central importance to Richter’s oeuvre. Grappling with the painterly legacies of German Romanticism as well as a suspicion of the photograph as a document of objective truth, Richter strove in the 1960s to forge a new relevance for painting. By recasting the stag as a ghostly, evanescent form, he was also reassessing a picture-postcard image of Bavarian backwoods not dissimilar to the Highland vision propagated by The Monarch of the Glen: in an age where symbols were in question, even dangerous, Richter dissolved this icon to reflect a Germany divided and damaged by the divisions of the twentieth century.
The craggy, regal composition of The Monarch of the Glen has also found its way into the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman, enfants terribles even amongst the controversial Young British Artists of the 1990s. In their sculpture Übermensch (1995), they raised an eerily realistic Stephen Hawking atop a huge, rocky outcrop, the astrophysicist’s wheelchair poised perilously at its edge. While the title’s Nietzschean reference makes clear another link to German Romanticism – as well as the work’s visual echo of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) (fig. 10) – this recasting of an icon was also rooted in Landseer’s work, as the brothers have explained. ‘We are interested in perfect and imperfect bodies. With Übermensch we were interested in Stephen’s perfect mind animated within an imperfect body, which gives rise to a kind of fanatical or extreme idealism which is fuelled by his bodily entropy. The degeneration of his body infects his theoretical position, becoming more speculative and flowery. We elevated him to become a sort of Monarch of the Glen, or Monarch of Astrophysics’ (J. and D. Chapman, quoted in R. Rosenblum, ‘Revelations: A Conversation between Robert Rosenblum and Dinos and Jake Chapman,’ Unholy Libel: Dinos and Jake Chapman: Six Feet Under, exh. cat. Gagosian, New York 1997, pp. 152-53). The Monarch of the Glen lives on throughout the shifting visual language of contemporary art in surprising places, whether subverted, reimagined or simply admired: majestic, vital and multifaceted, the magnetism of Landseer’s stag endures.
Though rooted in the sporting tradition of British art, Landseer’s picture also reflects wider influences. He was a passionate admirer of seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish art, Rubens and Snyders in particular, whose hunting scenes proved a fruitful source of ideas for themes and compositions (fig. 2). Paulus Potter’s close-up heads of bulls are an obvious precedent for Landseer’s stag. Among contemporary French artists he would certainly have known the work of Gericault (fig. 3) who exhibited the Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Musée de Louvre, Paris) in London in 1821. The French artist praised Landseer’s animal pictures that he saw at the Royal Academy that year. One French artist Landseer is known to have admired is Horace Vernet, whose Mazeppa and the Wolves of 1826 (Rouen, Musée Municipal) echoes the spirited romanticism of Landseer’s early paintings.
The influence was not all one way. Landseer’s prints had been widely circulated in France from the 1830s onwards. At the International Exhibition in Paris in 1855, his pictures blew away the French critics and public. The art critic Théophile Gautier reflected that ‘Landseer gives his beloved animals soul, thought, poetry, and passion. He endows them with an intellectual life almost like our own; he would if he dared, take away their instinct and accord them free will; what worries him is not anatomical exactitude, complicated joints, the thickness of the paint, masterful brushwork: it is the very sprit of the beast, and in this respect there is no painter to match him’ (Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, Paris, 1855, I, pp. 72-7, cited in R. Ormond, op. cit., 1981, p. 31). He was one of the very few foreigners awarded a gold medal in the exhibition. In the wake of this, Rosa Bonheur, the famous French animal painter became a kind of protégé of his, and it is hardly conceivable that Courbet was not aware of Landseer’s deer pictures when painting his own.
The artist’s representation is, in a sense, a fiction, because no human could ever get so close to a living deer in the wild. We have to accept the heroic, emblematic nature of the image rather than question its reality. Landseer celebrates the splendour of the stag, but we must remember that the stag is also a quarry and a potential trophy for the hunter. It is a moot point whether Landseer, a keen sportsman, is viewing this one through a telescope, paint-brush in hand, or through the sights of his rifle. The tension between the two would never be resolved, natural wonder versus hunter’s prey, and such ambivalence underpins all the artist’s great deer subjects.
Not only the stag but the setting is spectacular. The picture captures the freshness of morning in the mountains in a sparkling key, with the sun slowly dissolving the mist. When the picture was first exhibited, at the Royal Academy of 1851, it was accompanied by a poem identified as The Legends of Glenorchay:
When first the day - star’s clear cool light,
Chasing night’s shadows grey,
With silver touched each rocky height
That girded wild Glen-Strae
Uprose the Monarch of the Glen
Majestic from his lair,
Surveyed the scene with piercing ken,
And snuffed the fragrant air.
The forests of Glenorchay belonged to the Marquess of Breadalbane, with whom Landseer often stayed and hunted. However, the rocks in the background are said to be identical with those in Glen Quoich, an estate belonging to the Ellice family, who also hosted the artist, which are still called ‘Landseer’s rocks’.
The Monarch of the Glen belongs to a group of deer paintings from the 1840s painted on a grandiose scale. These include The Sanctuary (c. 1842; London, The Royal Collection), The Challenge (c. 1844; Northumberland, Alnwick Castle), The Stag at Bay (fig. 4; private collection) and A Random Shot (c. 1848; Bury, Bury Art Gallery and Museum). In these works Landseer sought to raise sporting subjects to the level of high art, following in the footsteps of Rubens, Snyders and Oudry. He shows empathy for the quarry as they face death from the hounds and the guns, or occasionally find safety and sanctuary. The never-ending conflict between man and nature is presented in terms of an epic struggle between contending adversaries.
Landseer was no stranger to the Scottish Highlands. He first went there in 1824, visiting Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford and painting the author and his dogs, before going on to Glen Tilt to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, who would become his devoted friends and patrons. In subsequent seasons he often stayed at Glenfeshie in the Cairngorms, where the Duchess and her friends camped out in a remote group of huts. Here Landseer painted narrative scenes, vivid landscape sketches, and deer subjects for which he would become famous, while enjoying life as a sportsman. He was not immune to the poverty and underside of Highland life, witness The Stonebreaker (c. 1830; London, Victoria & Albert Museum) and The Illicit Highland Whisky Still (c. 1829; London, Apsley House), but the Highland clearances find no echo in his work. The introduction of sheep and the development on sporting estates led to the displacement of crofters and clansmen in the 1820s and 1830s, often to be replaced by wealthy southerners coming up to shoot and fish. Landseer would give visual form to their romantic notions of Highland life and sport. He was their artist.
The Monarch of the Glen was originally commissioned as one of three works planned for the Refreshment Room in the House of Lords. The Palace of Westminster had been rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1834, captured memorably by Turner (fig. 5), and many artists had been involved in its subsequent decoration, overseen by the Fine Arts Commission. In 1849, Landseer accepted a commission to decorate three panels in the Refreshment Room for a fee of one thousand guineas. He wrote to Charles Eastlake, the secretary of the Commission, on 24 June 1849: ‘I name this sum without any fixed idea as to the class of subject, which would greatly depend on the scheme for the general embellishment of the apartment. If only three Pictures are placed – rather above the level of the eye, the subjects represented should, I think, be larger’ (Victoria & Albert Museum, Eng MS, 86 M 3, no. 27. The possible placing of the picture on a staircase in the Palace of Westminster is discussed by Eastlake in a letter of 28 July 1851 to Prince Albert [Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, F.31/1]). Landseer later questioned whether a refreshment room was the most appropriate location for his work. The commission was subject to a parliamentary vote and when the Fine Arts Commission estimates came up for review the members voted it down. Landseer had already begun work on the first canvas, which would become The Monarch of the Glen, and he decided to complete it as an easel painting. Its unusual, almost square format was dictated by the proportions of the spaces in the Refreshment Room.
Landseer sent the picture to the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1851. The critic for the Athenaeum wrote: ‘Largeness of scale is now evidently best calculated for the expression of Sir Edwin Landseer’s powers’ … ‘To the freedom and certainty of such language we owe the more than common success of that fine stag, The Monarch of the Glen (112), and of the Group, Geneva (134). The first is a grand exemplification of animal nature in repose’. The art critic of the Art Journal continued in the same vein: 'The Monarch of the Glen is a fine stag that, according to the description of the lines, seems to be testing the quality of the mountain air. The head of the stag is a fine study, it is borne aloft with the proud and graceful bearing natural to the animal. His round and well-conditioned body comes in relief against the sky, below which is a section of mountain scenery'.
Landseer had another twenty years to live following the exhibition of The Monarch of the Glen. Though plagued by neurosis and depression, his powers as an artist remained undiminished to the end. He was kept on the rails and supported by some exceptional friends, who managed his affairs and forgave him his erratic behaviour. Among his late masterpieces are several deer subjects, including The Deer Pass (c. 1852; Wyoming, Jackson, National Museum of Wildlife Art), Night and Morning (c. 1853; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Art Museum), Scene in Braemar (c. 1857; private collection), The Hunted Stag (c. 1859, Fredericton, Beaverbrook Art Gallery) and The Fatal Duel (c. 1861; Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle). Other masterpieces mark out his last decade including The Highland Flood (c. 1860; Aberdeen, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum), Man Proposes, God Disposes (1863-64; Egham, Royal Holloway College), a scene of Arctic disaster, The Swannery Invaded by Eagles (c. 1869; private collection), and the four bronze lions around the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square (1858-66). Following his death in 1873, a six day studio sale was held in these Rooms, and a memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy the following year included over five hundred works. Though his faults were not glossed over, he was praised in contemporary obituaries as the greatest animal painter of his time, and the author of many of the most popular paintings of the nineteenth century. He was accorded a public funeral, before his interment in the crypt of St Paul’s, and, among the many wreaths placed on his coffin, one would have especially touched him: ‘A tribute of Friendship and Admiration for Great Talents. From Queen Victoria’. He had painted the Queen, her family and pets over the course of more than thirty years, and he had been the chief recorder of her life at home in London and in the Highlands (fig. 6). The Queen was the artist’s chief patron, but there many others in the upper ranks of the aristocracy, to name only the Dukes of Abercorn, Atholl, Bedford, Devonshire, Gordon and Northumberland, the Marquesses of Breadalbane and Stafford, and the Earls of Aberdeen, Ellesmere and Tankerville. He had been their servant and devoted friend.
A note on the provenance
The Monarch of the Glen was purchased at the Royal Academy exhibition (or soon afterwards) by Albert Denison, 1st Baron Londesborough (1805-60), a prominent liberal politician, who had inherited a title and a fortune shortly before. He acquired a mansion, Grimston, near Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and set about filling it with works of art. He may well have been involved in the negotiations for the decoration of the Refreshment Room, which would have given him a personal stake in the picture. The Monarch of the Glen was engraved by the artist’s elder brother, Thomas Landseer, and published as a large print by Henry Graves & Co. Three hundred artist’s proofs were sold at ten guineas each and an unlimited number of ordinary prints at three guineas (details of the edition can be found in An Alphabetical List of Engravings Declared at the Office of the Printsellers’ Association, London…Since its Establishment in 1847 to the end of 1891, London, 2 vols., 1892-94, p. 242). The picture was later engraved by George Zobel on a smaller scale. Landseer was the most engraved British artist of the nineteenth century and it was through this medium that his work reached a mass audience.
Following the death in 1883 of Lord Londesborough’s second wife, Lady Fitzgerald, who had by then remarried, the picture came up for sale in these Rooms, where it was bought by the wealthy politician and art collector, Henry William Eaton, 1st Baron Cheylesmore (1816-91), who, amongst other things, owned a superb collection of Landseer’s work. It was sold again at his death to be bought by Thomas James Barratt (1841-1914), who has been described as ‘The Father of Modern Advertising’. As managing director of A. & F. Pears, the soap manufacturers, he promoted his products through modern marketing methods. Amongst his innovations was the employment of works of art in Pears advertisements, most famously Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais, which upset the artist and led to accusations of vulgarity. But it worked and Barratt’s rivals followed his lead, among them Lever Brothers, the company run by Lord Leverhulme at Port Sunlight, which would take over Pears in 1920.
The Monarch of the Glen does not seem to have featured in advertisements but to have formed part of Barratt’s personal collection. Its fame as an advertising icon came with its next owner Sir Thomas Dewar (1864-1930), later Lord Dewar, who together with his older brother John, Lord Forteviot, was responsible for building the family firm into one of Scotland’s largest whisky companies. The picture became inextricably linked to the company as a brand image to be reproduced in countless labels and advertisements (fig. 7). It was not the only picture to be immortalized in this way. Dewar bought two other landmark pictures, Sir Henry Raeburn’s majestic portrait of a Highland chieftain, The McNab (on loan to Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow), and The Thin Red Line by Robert Gibb (on loan to the Scottish National War Museum, Edinburgh), a scene from the Crimean War, and these, too, were deployed in the promotion of whisky. The Monarch of the Glen would in the course of time come to feature as a trademark in the promotion of other products apart from drink, giving it a universal currency. Few other images from the nineteenth century remain so well-known and so popular.
We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Landseer’s Legacy
The Monarch of the Glen resounds across contemporary visual culture. Even as its status as a romantic icon of the Highlands has verged on the ubiquitous – adorning everything from whisky labels and biscuit tins to countless prints and advertisements – the mastery of Landseer’s painting remains clear. Indeed, it was a deep fondness for the original work that led Paul McCartney to commission Peter Blake to create a version of the Monarch in 1966 (fig. 8). Blake’s meticulous interpretation, complete with a distinctive Pop-inflected textual label, pays sensitive homage to Landseer’s silken play of light and form while making a nod to the stag’s place in mass-produced imagery: he was working from a printed reproduction. Indirectly, this artistic encounter would lead to one of the most famed album covers of the century – in 1967 McCartney would commission Blake to design the artwork for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Painting, of course, in a post-abstraction and post-War world, is not looked at in the same light as in Landseer’s time. Gerhard Richter, perhaps the foremost painter of the contemporary era, executed Hirsch (Deer) in 1963 (fig. 9). While not a direct response to Monarch of the Glen, a comparison between the two works is striking. Landseer’s brilliantly atmospheric, sunlit colours are reduced to total grey; Richter’s spectral stag, rather than standing proud above a sublime landscape, is small, furtive and blurred, hiding in a claustrophobic expanse of forest, whose trunks and branches are skeletally outlined in graphic black against a flat grey wash. A detail of this work was used for the cover of the Robert Storr monograph Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (2003), which captures its central importance to Richter’s oeuvre. Grappling with the painterly legacies of German Romanticism as well as a suspicion of the photograph as a document of objective truth, Richter strove in the 1960s to forge a new relevance for painting. By recasting the stag as a ghostly, evanescent form, he was also reassessing a picture-postcard image of Bavarian backwoods not dissimilar to the Highland vision propagated by The Monarch of the Glen: in an age where symbols were in question, even dangerous, Richter dissolved this icon to reflect a Germany divided and damaged by the divisions of the twentieth century.
The craggy, regal composition of The Monarch of the Glen has also found its way into the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman, enfants terribles even amongst the controversial Young British Artists of the 1990s. In their sculpture Übermensch (1995), they raised an eerily realistic Stephen Hawking atop a huge, rocky outcrop, the astrophysicist’s wheelchair poised perilously at its edge. While the title’s Nietzschean reference makes clear another link to German Romanticism – as well as the work’s visual echo of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) (fig. 10) – this recasting of an icon was also rooted in Landseer’s work, as the brothers have explained. ‘We are interested in perfect and imperfect bodies. With Übermensch we were interested in Stephen’s perfect mind animated within an imperfect body, which gives rise to a kind of fanatical or extreme idealism which is fuelled by his bodily entropy. The degeneration of his body infects his theoretical position, becoming more speculative and flowery. We elevated him to become a sort of Monarch of the Glen, or Monarch of Astrophysics’ (J. and D. Chapman, quoted in R. Rosenblum, ‘Revelations: A Conversation between Robert Rosenblum and Dinos and Jake Chapman,’ Unholy Libel: Dinos and Jake Chapman: Six Feet Under, exh. cat. Gagosian, New York 1997, pp. 152-53). The Monarch of the Glen lives on throughout the shifting visual language of contemporary art in surprising places, whether subverted, reimagined or simply admired: majestic, vital and multifaceted, the magnetism of Landseer’s stag endures.