Sir Edwin Landseer

A cabinet card portrait of the animal painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873).

Landseer achieved enormous popularity with his sentimental studies of animals. He is perhaps best remembered for his Monarch of the Glen of 1850, intended for the House of Lords. His sculptures include the lions in Trafalgar Square, London, executed in 1859.

In the late 1830s Landseer suffered what is now believed to be a nervous breakdown, and for the rest of his life he was troubled by recurring bouts of melancholy, hypochondria, and depression, often aggravated by alcohol and drug use. In the last few years of his life, his mental stability was problematic and at the request of his family he was declared insane in July 1872.

His death on 1 October 1873 was widely marked in England. Shops and houses lowered their blinds, flags flew at half-staff, his bronze lions at the base of Nelson's column were hung with wreaths, and large crowds lined the streets to watch his funeral cortege pass. He was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

Photographed by the London Stereoscopic Company.