The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (261 page)

 
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(1802/3–73).
English painter, sculptor, and engraver of animal subjects. He was the son of an engraver and writer,
John Landseer
(1769–1852), and was an infant prodigy. His life was one of continuous professional and social success; he was the favourite painter of Queen Victoria (who considered him ‘very good looking although rather short’) and his friends included Dickens and Thackeray. The qualities in his work that delighted the Victorian public, however, have subsequently caused his reputation to plummet, for although he had great skill in depicting animal anatomy, he tended to humanize his subjects to tell a sentimental story or point a moral. His most familiar works in this vein include
The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner
(V&A, London, 1837),
Dignity and Impudence
(Tate, London, 1839), and the celebrated
The Monarch of the Glen
(Guinness plc, Edinburgh, 1850). Other paintings by Landseer have been attacked for their cruelty (he made many visits to the Scottish Highlands and frequently painted scenes of deer-hunting). Apart from animal subjects, Landseer also painted portraits and historical scenes. As a sculptor he is best known for the lions at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London, unveiled in 1867. Landseer's health broke down in the 1860s, and in his last years he suffered from bouts of madness, aggravated by alcohol. His brother
Thomas
(1798–1880) was an engraver, whose prints played a great part in popularizing Edwin's work. Another brother,
Charles
(1800–79), bequeathed £10,000 to the Royal Academy to found Landseer scholarships.

 
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(1875–1915).
Irish dealer, patron, collector, and administrator. He made his fortune as a picture dealer in London and had no particular interest in Ireland until about 1900, when through the influence of Sarah
Purser
and the play-wright Lady Gregory (his aunt) he became caught up in the rising tide of nationalism in the arts. He commissioned Jack
Yeats
to paint a series of eminent contemporary Irishmen (it was completed by
Orpen
, a distant cousin and close friend of Lane's) and he helped to found Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, opened in temporary premises in 1906. In addition to giving and lending numerous works to the gallery, he offered to bequeath his finest late 19th- and early 20th-cent. French paintings to Dublin, on condition that a suitable gallery were built to house them. This caused arguments with the Dublin City Authorities, however, and he moved the pictures to the National Gallery in London. Lane was killed when the
Lusitania
(on which he was returning from business in the USA) was torpedoed by a German submarine. A codicil to his will expressed his intention of returning the French pictures to Dublin, but it was unwitnessed, creating a long-term legal dispute about their ownership. In 1959 an agreement was eventually reached whereby the paintings were divided into groups to be shown alternately in Dublin and London. This agreement was renewed in 1980. The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art was given a permanent home in Dublin in 1933, and in 1979 it was renamed the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

 
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(1582–1647).
Italian painter, who with
Guercino
and Pietro da
Cortona
ranks as one of the founders of the High
Baroque
style of painting. He was born in Parma, where he trained under Agostino
Carracci
before going to Rome in 1602 to work under Annibale Carracci in the Palazzo Farnese. After Annibale's death in 1609, he returned for a while to Emilia, but by about 1612 was back in Rome, where he gradually superseded his arch-rival
Domenichino
as the leading fresco decorator in the city. His ascendancy was confirmed when he took over from Domenichino the major commission for the decoration of the dome of S. Andrea della Valle ; the
Assumption of the Virgin
(1625–7) that Lanfranco painted here is one of the key works of Baroque art and it ended the dominance of Bolognese classicism in Rome. The heroic figure style derives from the Carracci, but the
illusionistic
foreshortening is based on
Correggio's
dome paintings in Lanfranco's native Parma, here carried to new extremes.
Bellori
compared the way in which Lanfranco handles the multitude of figures to the harmonious blending of voices in a choir, and the dynamic design became a pattern for illusionistic decorators throughout Europe. Between 1633 and 1646 Lanfranco was in Naples, where his work was an inspiration to such Neapolitan masters as Mattia
Preti
, Luca
Giordano
, and
Solimena
. In the S. Gennaro Chapel of the cathedral he painted an even more extravagant dome (1641–3) than his masterpiece in S. Andrea della Valle, and this inspired Pietro da Cortona in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome and
Mignard
in the church of the Val-de-Grâce in Paris. He returned to Rome in 1646 and his last (unfinished) work in the apse of S. Carlo ai Catinari exemplifies the airy luminosity of his final style. Lanfranco is much less renowned as an easel painter, but he created some outstanding works in this field also. Particularly remarkable are his
Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona
(Pitti, Florence), on which
Bernini
may have drawn for his
St Teresa
, and
St Mary Magdalen Transported to Heaven
(Museo di Capodimonte, Naples), a bizarre and highly original work in which the rapturous saint is carried by angels above a poetically evoked view of the Roman Campagna.

 
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Lanyon , Peter
.

see
ST IVES SCHOOL
.

 
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