THE HIGHWAY TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 



CLOSE examination of the annals of painting from the very earliest record 

 to the present time, so far as they have been handed down to us, would 

 fail in producing any one artist who may be put in juxtaposition with Sir 

 Edwin Landseer. Animal-painters there have been, and are, both in Eng- 

 land and on the Continent — artists whose works are held in high estima- 

 tion, and deservedly so; but their pictures want the peculiar charm which is characteristic 

 of him — the elevation of the animal, and especially of the dog, into something that 

 closely approximates to human nature in its generous sympathies. It would be difficult 

 to point to any contemporaneous artist of our own school who, from almost the very 

 outset of his career, has been so successful in winning the good opinion of the public ; 

 and this may be readily accounted for in the fact that his pictures, independent of 

 their merits as works of art, appeal to the tastes of thousands of our countrymen and 

 countrywomen : nationally, we love the race of domestic animals, and are interested in 

 everything that relates to them, and Landseer has presented them to us in their most 

 attractive aspects. It was his good fortune, when quite young, to be freely and 

 liberally encouraged, and this good fortune never forsook him. A writer some years 

 ago remarked that, "had his earlier claims on the public attention been neglected, the 

 probability is that, instead of advancing under the cheering auspices of a noble house * 

 to the eminence he has reached, he would have struggled for a season, retrograded, 

 and, by degrees, dwindled, like a thousand others, into obscurity." Admitting the 

 essential and valuable aid that judicious patronage affords to a young artist, if only 

 because it serves to encourage him in his labours, and braces him up for renewed 



* An allusion to the then Duke of Bedford. 



