Landseer

Landseer is a book by Estelle May Hurll. The title page describes A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the Painter, with introduction and interpretation. The preface says the wide popularity of Landseer has been chiefly due to the circulation of engravings after his works. The preface calls the book, so far as the writer knows, the first attempt to bring together a collection of his pictures made in the modern process of half tone, from photographs direct from the original paintings.

The text says none would dare to claim that Landseer never fell into such error, and that in interpreting the emotions of dumb animals he sometimes overdrew, or seemed to overdraw, their resemblance to human beings. A description of one picture says there are two dragoons, vigorous men in the prime of life, and their two splendid horses, and that the man lying most plainly in sight has the appearance of an officer, from the sash worn diagonally over his steel coat. The text describes Sir Edwin Landseer as probably the most popular painter of his day, a man of heavy figure, six feet in height, with a weather-beaten countenance.