Edwin Henry Landseers work Waiting - Essay Example

Edwin Landseer Artists are inspired for new works by the scenes and ideas that are most familiar to them. Many of the landscape paintings done by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali include scenes from the Catalan Coast. This was not only because they were some of the scenes he was most familiar with them from his childhood, but also because the shifting characteristics of the cliffs provided him with the ideas he wanted express about the duality of meaning that was the theme of his work. Because all artists tend to capture the images and scenes that mean the most to them, whether they intend to or not, they also manage to provide their audience with clues as to the ideals of their era.

As a result, artistic efforts often provide useful tools for the study and understanding of complicated concepts in a variety of fields. In cases in which the artists choose to provide visual images in which the forms and figures are recognizable, future generations are able to get a sense of how these people lived by examining shifts in depictions, deliberate misrepresentation and so forth that provide clues as to the underlying social structures. These ideas can be found in Sir Edwin Henry Landseer’s work, such as in his oil on canvas painting “Waiting” (1835).

This painting appears to represent an inner courtyard to an estate. An arched wooden door stands ajar at the back of the painting revealing blue sky and green fields, but there is a stonework wall surrounding the picture space and the ground is covered with bare ground and more stonework. A cement stairway curves up along the left-hand side of the painting just revealing the bottom edge of another wooden door at the top of the steps. The second-floor banister for these steps is covered with a red rug on which perch several birds.

The main characters of the image, though, are a dazzlingly white horse, a small black dog and a much larger black and white Newfoundland dog. The horse is saddled with an expensive-looking English saddle and bridled with delicate straps that hang down near the Newfoundland. The larger dog is holding the riding crop in its mouth, as if it is patiently holding onto the horse until their master returns in much the same way that a groom might. This particular type of dog often appeared in Landseer’s paintings.

“So popular and influential were Landseer’s paintings of dogs in the service of humanity that the name Landseer came to be the official name for the variety of Newfoundland dog that, rather than being black or mostly black, features a mix of both black and white” (Edwin Henry Landseer, 2009). For Landseer, they represented the ultimate in animal loyalty and intelligence (Stephens, 1880). He reinforces the feeling of waiting that is the theme of this particular painting by cleverly using line and color to trap the viewer’s eye within the painting (textbook).

The brightest part of the painting is the brilliant white coat of the horse which is strongly contrasted against the reds and browns of the background and the shadows of the foreground. The line of the steps blocks the eye from leaving the painting on that side in order to redirect it up and over to the highlighted areas of the red rug. Then the eye tends to follow the pole leaning against the wall back down to the figure of the horse and then over to the dog. The riding crop in the dog’s mouth points back over to the stairs completing the circle.

Through his painting, Sir Edwin Landseer manages to convey a sense of timeless waiting, unwavering loyalty and the aristocracy of his age by the images he chooses to represent and the way he chooses to represent them. One gets the sense that all of these animals, including the birds, are servants of the master of the house. They are so by choice as the open door in the background provides them with the ability to leave any time they want. Because they instead stand ready to serve whenever the master appears reinforces the idea of the superiority of the English race that was a prevailing concept of the time at the same time that he presents a static scene full of movement because of the way he directs the eye.

Works Cited “Edwin Henry Landseer.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (2009). October 11, 2009 Stephens, Frederic George. Sir Edwin Landseer. Oxford University: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880. Google books Textbook