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Lot Essay
Dated 1837 by Algernon Graves, the picture exemplifies Landseer's unrivalled skill as a painter of animals, both the old white horse and the black mongrel being treated with typical sympathy and insight. It also expresses his passionate feeling for the Scottish Highlands. Landseer had paid his first visit to Scotland in 1824 as a prodigiously talented young artist of twenty-one. He had stayed ten days with the perfect mentor, Sir Walter Scott himself, and so overwhelming was the experience that he was to return every year to paint, hunt and shoot. Landseer, in fact, was one of the first artists to discover the romance of the Highlands and articulate it for the Victorians, whose love affair with Scotland, from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert downwards, needs no emphasis.
The Wood Cutter belonged to William (Billy) Wells (1818-1889), the nephew and heir of William Wells of Redleaf (1768-1847), with whom he is often confused. The elder William Wells was one of Landseer's closest friends and staunchest patrons. A shipbuilder by profession, he built up a magnificent collection of paintings, which included at least twenty by Landseer. The artist was a frequent visitor to Redleaf, Wells's estate in Kent, regarding it as something of a second home. When Wells died in 1847, Redleaf and its collection passed to his nephew, Billy, member of parliament for Huntingdonshire and a pioneer in the field of agricultural reform. With him too, Landseer formed a close friendship. He continued to stay at Redleaf, as well as paying frequent visits to Billy's second country house, Holme Wood, Peterborough, in his parliamentary constituency. They were frequently fellow sportsmen in Scotland and elsewhere, and Billy, like his uncle, commissioned important works from the artist. A collection of over 230 letters that Billy received from Landseer, the most extensive of its kind and documenting the friendship in vivid detail, is in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Perhaps the closest comparison to The Wood Cutter in Landseer's work is The Stone Breaker (fig. 1), a picture which, as it happens, belonged to the elder William Wells. Like The Wood Cutter, it is a Highland subject and celebrates rural labour. There are also similar dramatis personae, the old stone-breaker being accompanied by a young girl, possibly his daughter, and a dog. Both pictures, moreover, differ from so many of Landseer's Highland subjects in not taking their themes from the rituals of hunting and shooting. No attempt is made to evade the harshness of the lifestyles depicted, but the mood is essentially lyrical. There is none of that almost unbearable tension which occurs in the hunting and shooting subjects between the miraculous beauty of nature and the cruelty and pain inseparable from these pursuits.
Nonetheless, it is probably significant that The Wood Cutter is some years later than The Stone Breaker, which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1830. While The Stone Breaker is conceived in terms of straightforward narrative, The Wood Cutter hints at some deeper layer of meaning. In a subtle and understated way, the idea of felling timber for winter fuel seems to become a metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. The wood-cutter himself, though seen from behind and relegated to the middle distance, assumes an unmistakably Death-like role, as if he was harvesting souls with scythe or sickle. The young girl appears to comment on the allegory, holding our gaze with a wistful and enigmatic expression, while the horse and its canine companion emphasise the mood of patient resignation to the dictates of fate.
Landseer often gives his pictures this extra, symbolic, dimension, and it was a tendency that grew on him over the years. The development is seen very clearly in his long series of deer subjects, which begin as essentially sporting pictures but, from the early 1840s, take on an increasingly visionary intensity in which, as Richard Ormond has observed, the stag 'becomes the symbol of the powerful and tragic forces of nature, noble but inevitably doomed'. We are not talking here about so clearly demarcated a phenomenon, but there is a sense in which the vague but insistent intimations of mortality embodied by The Wood Cutter are finally resolved in the more overt references to this theme in some of Landseer's later works - pictures such as The Shepherd's Prayer (c. 1845; Royal Collection), a meditation on sacrifice and redemption in the context of the Battle of Waterloo; or that late masterpiece Man Proposes, God Disposes (1863-4; Royal Holloway College), inspired by the tragic loss of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expeditionary fleet in 1847.
We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in preparing this entry.
The Wood Cutter belonged to William (Billy) Wells (1818-1889), the nephew and heir of William Wells of Redleaf (1768-1847), with whom he is often confused. The elder William Wells was one of Landseer's closest friends and staunchest patrons. A shipbuilder by profession, he built up a magnificent collection of paintings, which included at least twenty by Landseer. The artist was a frequent visitor to Redleaf, Wells's estate in Kent, regarding it as something of a second home. When Wells died in 1847, Redleaf and its collection passed to his nephew, Billy, member of parliament for Huntingdonshire and a pioneer in the field of agricultural reform. With him too, Landseer formed a close friendship. He continued to stay at Redleaf, as well as paying frequent visits to Billy's second country house, Holme Wood, Peterborough, in his parliamentary constituency. They were frequently fellow sportsmen in Scotland and elsewhere, and Billy, like his uncle, commissioned important works from the artist. A collection of over 230 letters that Billy received from Landseer, the most extensive of its kind and documenting the friendship in vivid detail, is in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Perhaps the closest comparison to The Wood Cutter in Landseer's work is The Stone Breaker (fig. 1), a picture which, as it happens, belonged to the elder William Wells. Like The Wood Cutter, it is a Highland subject and celebrates rural labour. There are also similar dramatis personae, the old stone-breaker being accompanied by a young girl, possibly his daughter, and a dog. Both pictures, moreover, differ from so many of Landseer's Highland subjects in not taking their themes from the rituals of hunting and shooting. No attempt is made to evade the harshness of the lifestyles depicted, but the mood is essentially lyrical. There is none of that almost unbearable tension which occurs in the hunting and shooting subjects between the miraculous beauty of nature and the cruelty and pain inseparable from these pursuits.
Nonetheless, it is probably significant that The Wood Cutter is some years later than The Stone Breaker, which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1830. While The Stone Breaker is conceived in terms of straightforward narrative, The Wood Cutter hints at some deeper layer of meaning. In a subtle and understated way, the idea of felling timber for winter fuel seems to become a metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. The wood-cutter himself, though seen from behind and relegated to the middle distance, assumes an unmistakably Death-like role, as if he was harvesting souls with scythe or sickle. The young girl appears to comment on the allegory, holding our gaze with a wistful and enigmatic expression, while the horse and its canine companion emphasise the mood of patient resignation to the dictates of fate.
Landseer often gives his pictures this extra, symbolic, dimension, and it was a tendency that grew on him over the years. The development is seen very clearly in his long series of deer subjects, which begin as essentially sporting pictures but, from the early 1840s, take on an increasingly visionary intensity in which, as Richard Ormond has observed, the stag 'becomes the symbol of the powerful and tragic forces of nature, noble but inevitably doomed'. We are not talking here about so clearly demarcated a phenomenon, but there is a sense in which the vague but insistent intimations of mortality embodied by The Wood Cutter are finally resolved in the more overt references to this theme in some of Landseer's later works - pictures such as The Shepherd's Prayer (c. 1845; Royal Collection), a meditation on sacrifice and redemption in the context of the Battle of Waterloo; or that late masterpiece Man Proposes, God Disposes (1863-4; Royal Holloway College), inspired by the tragic loss of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expeditionary fleet in 1847.
We are grateful to Richard Ormond for his help in preparing this entry.