Kyle Royer with knife collector, Paul Kessler, at the Chicago Custom Knife Show

Sold, $1,250

Sold, $900

Kyle Royer looking for stag and mammoth ivory handle material

Edwin Landseer’s father John Landseer was an engraver and lover of art and descended from a long line of artistic workers in precious metals. His mother, a Miss Pott, was also artistic. Edwin was the youngest son of a close-knit family which included seven children — his brothers, Thomas and Charles, were artists.

Quote from Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous People: Eminent Painters by Elbert Hubbard, 1899, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, pages 443-468.

Quote

Long before his children knew their letters, they were taught to make pictures. Indeed, all children can make pictures before they can write. For a play spell each day John Landseer and his boys tramped across Hampstead heath to where there were donkeys, sheep, goats, and cows grazing; then all four would sit down on the grass before some chosen subject and sketch the patient model.

A Fox in Profile, 1807 (Landseer was 5 years old)

Edwin Landseer’s first loving recollections of his father went back to these little excursions across the Heath. And for each boy to take back to his mother and sisters a picture of something they had seen was a great joy.

“Well, boys, what shall we draw today?” the father would ask at breakfast time.

And then they would all vote on it, and arguments in favor of goat or donkey were eloquently and skillfully set forth. …

Two Dogs in Profile, 1808

Art education had better begin young, for then it is a sort of play: and good artistic work, Robert Louis Stevenson once said, is only useful play.

Probably Edwin Landseer’s education began a hundred years before he was born; but his technical instruction in art began when he was three years old, when his father would take him out on the Heath and placing him on the grass, put pencil and paper in his hand and let him make a picture of a goat nibbling the grass.

Then the boy noted for himself that a goat had a short tail, a cow a switch tail, and horses had no horns, and that a ram’s horns were unlike those of a goat.

He had begun to differentiate and compare — and not yet four years old!

When five years of age he could sketch a sleeping dog as it lay on the floor better than could Thomas, his brother, who was seven years older.

We know the deep personal interest that John Landseer felt in the boy, for he preserved his work, and today in the South Kensington Museum we can see a series of sketches made by Edwin Landseer, running from his fifth year to manhood.

Thus do we trace the unfolding of his genius.

That young Landseer’s drawing was a sort of play there is no doubt. People who set very young children at tasks of grubbing out cold facts from books come plainly within the province of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and should be looked after, but to do things with one’s hands for fun is only a giving direction to the natural energies.

Before Edwin Landseer was eight years of age his father had taught him the process of etching, and we see that even then the lad had a vivid insight into the character of animals. He drew pictures of pointers, mastiffs, spaniels, and bulldogs, and gave to each the right expression.

The Landseers owned several dogs, and what they did not own they borrowed; and once we know that Charles and Thomas “borrowed” a mastiff without the owner’s consent.

All children go through the scissors age, when they cut out of magazines, newspapers, or books all the pictures they can find so as to add to the “collection.” Often these youthful collectors have specialties; one will collect pictures of animals, another of machinery, and still another of houses. But usually it is animals that attract.

Scissors were forbidden in the Landseer household, and if the boys wanted pictures they had to make them.

And they made them.

They drew horses, sheep, donkeys, cattle, dogs; and when their father took them to the Zoological Garden it was only that they might bring back trophies in the way of lions and tigers.

The Head of a Pig, 1810

Then we find that there was once a curiosity exhibited in Fleet Street in the way of a lion cub that had been caught in Africa and mothered by a Newfoundland dog. The old mother dog thought just as much of the orphan that was placed among her brood as of her sure enough children. The owner had never allowed the two animals to be separated, and when the lion had grown to be twice the size of his foster mother there still existed between the two a fine affection.

The stepmother exercised a stepmother’s rights, and occasionally chastised, for his own good, her overgrown charge, and the big brute would whimper and whine like a lubberly boy.

This curious pair of animals made a great impression on the Landseers. The father and three boys sketched them in various attitudes, and engravings of Edwin’s sketch are still to be had.

And so whenever in London animals were to be found, there, too, were the Landseers with pencils and brushes, and pads and palattes.

In the back yard of the house where the Landseers lived were sundry pens of pet rabbits; in the attic were pigeons, and dogs of various breeds lay on the doorstep sleeping in the sun, or barked at you out of the windows. …

Two Studies of a Horse’s Head, 1810

From Queen Anne Street the Landseers moved to Foley Street, near Burlington House. … The Elgin Marbles were then kept at Burlington House, and these were a great source of inspiration to the Landseer boys. It gave them a true taste of the Grecian, and knowing a little about Greece, they wanted to know more. Greece became the theme — they talked it at breakfast, dinner, and supper. The father and mother told them all they knew, and guessed at a few things more, and to keep at least one lesson ahead of the children the parents “crammed for examination.”

Edwin sketched that world famous horse’s head from the Parthenon, and the figures of horses and animals in bas-relief that formed the frieze; and the boys figured out in their own minds why the horses and men were all the same height.

Gradually it dawned upon the father and the brothers that Edwin was their master so far as drawing was concerned. They could sketch a Newfoundland dog that would pass for anybody’s Newfoundland, but Edwin’s was a certain identical dog, and none other.

Edwin Landseer really discovered the dog. …

Dignity and Imprudence

Plain people who owned a dog beloved by the whole household, as household dogs always are, became interested in Landseer’s dogs. They could not buy a painting by Landseer, but they could spare a few shillings for an engraving.

And so John Landseer began to reproduce the pictures of Edwin’s dogs.

End quote

Isaac van Amburgh and His Animals

Death of the Wild Bull

Attachment

A Highland Breakfast

The Monkey Who Had Seen the World

Saved

English children’s book author and illustrator

Beatrix Potter at 15 with her dog Spot
Used with permission Victoria and Albert Museum

Helen Beatrix Potter was educated at home by a series of nurses and governesses, and even from a very young age, Beatrix had good observation skills and grew into a fine naturalist. She was raised in London but her family left the city twice a year to stay in the country in Scotland or in the Lake District of northern England, and it was here that Beatrix developed a love for nature and the small wild animals. She produced great quantities of drawings where she recorded the minutest details of the animals and plants which she observed. She kept a family of snails, all of them distinct and named, and was saddened by their accidental deaths. “I am very much put out….they have such a surprising difference of character!” Her parents, who were quite strict, allowed her to keep the assortment of animals she brought back home to London: newts, snails, frogs, a ring-snake, lizards, a tortoise, a hedgehog, rabbits, and mice. These creatures served as her models. The hedgehog did not care for posing.

So long as she can go to sleep on my knee she is delighted, but if she is propped up on end for half an hour, she first begins to yawn pathetically and then she does bite!

Beatrix needed these models as, it is said, she could not draw or paint anything from imagination. Over a six year period when she was young, Beatrix made an intensive study of fungi, creating over 250 paintings of her samples. She had a great appetite for detailed information about everything in nature, no matter how minute.

It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling….the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye. Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw…

From age 12-17, Beatrix had drawing lessons with a Miss Cameron, with which she was reasonable happy. She learned “free-hand, model, geometry, perspective and a little watercolor flower painting.” She took twelve lessons from a Mrs. A…., which Beatrix hated. “I do wish these drawing lessons were over so that I could have some peace and sleep of nights!…” Beatrix worried that she would catch Mrs. A’s style but thought that her own “self-will which got me into so many scrapes will guard me here…” At age eighteen she wrote, “It [painting] cannot be taught, nothing after perspective, anatomy and the mixing of paints with medium…” “Thank goodness, my education was neglected…. The reason I am glad I did not go to school — it would have rubbed off some of the originality (if I had not died of shyness…).”

from The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

Over her lifetime, Beatrix wrote in excess of 1400 letters. At age 25 she began writing “picture-letters” to the children of friends, and these letters were the beginnings of her published books. Her first book The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was published when she was 36.

She started a daily journal at age thirteen and continued it until she was almost thirty years old. This journal was written in her own privately-invented miniaturized code and apparently even her closest friends knew nothing about it. We know of only one instance where it was mentioned and that was a brief mention of it in a letter to her cousin Caroline, written only five weeks before Beatrix died. Many years later, Leslie Lindner, a collector of Potter’s works, worked for twelve years to finally unlock and decipher the writing.

Leslie Linder
Used with permission Victoria and Albert Museum

Leslie Linder
Used with permission Victoria and Albert Museum

Beatrix relates what she believed inspired her to write children’s books:

1. Her ancestry of plain matter-of-fact folks.
2. Her having spent long stretches of time in the Scotland countryside with a Scottish nurse who told her stories.
3. Having a “precocious and tenacious memory.” She plainly remembered her life as a very small child — “not only facts, like learning to walk, but places and sentiments — the way things impressed a very young child…”

She “disliked writing to order; I write to please myself.” She would only illustrate her own text and would not consider working “to order.” Beatrix is one of the few artists who could also write stories. Very few could do both well. Beatrix painted in watercolours.

Beatrix memorized long passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare in order to keep her English style disciplined.

…My usual way of writing is to scribble, and cut out, and write it again and again. The shorter and plainer the better. And I read the Bible (unrevised version and Old Testament) if I feel my style wants chastening. There are many dialect words of the Bible and Shakespeare — and also the forcible direct language — still in use in the rural parts of Lancashire.

Excerpts from The Journal of Beatrix Potter From 1881 to 1897, Transcribed from Her Code Writing by Leslie Linder

July 15, 1883
Toby, one of the lizards we brought from Ilfracombe, departed from this life in the staggers. I think he must have been very old, he was so stiff and had lost so many toes. I think the cause of death was incapacity to derive any benefit from his food. I never saw anything with so little stomach as he had after he died.

July 17, 1883
Last Latin lesson before holidays. Have finished Dr. Arnold, am doing Virgil, like it so much…..

July 19, 1883
….Judy the female lizard laid an egg which unfortunately died in a few hours. It was alive and wriggling with large eyes, tail curled twice, veins and bladder or fluid like a chicken, showing through the transparent brown shell about a quarter inch long, nearly as large as Judy’s head. The same day Bertram bought for I/6, at Princes, a pair of hideous little beasties — Sally and Mander. Spot not very well.

September 20, 1883
…Yesterday, 19th. we bought a little ring-snake fourteen inches long, it was so pretty. It hissed like fun and tied itself into knots in the road when it found it could not escape, but did not attempt to bite as the blind worms do. It smelled strongly when in the open road, but not unpleasantly. Blind worms smell like very salt shrimps gone bad….

September 21, 1883
A day of misfortunes. Sally and four black newts escaped overnight. Caught one black newt in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally, who is probably sporting outside somewhere….

December 15, 1883
…we went to the Dore Gallery, which I had never seen before. What a contrast! I consider Dore one of the greatest of artists in black-and-white, but I never had any idea of his pictures before, except that they were big, which some of them certainly are.

Books by Beatrix Potter

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903)
The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904)
The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904)
The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905)
The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan (1905)
The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906)
The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit (1906)
The Story of Miss Moppet (1906)
The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907)
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908)
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or, The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908)
The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (1909)

from The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

The Tale of Ginger and Pickles (1909)
The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse (1910)
Peter Rabbit’s Painting Book (1911)
The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes (1911)
The Tale of Mr. Tod (1912)
The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913)

Tom Kitten’s Painting Book (1917)
Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes (1917)
The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (1918)
Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes (1922)
Jemima Puddle-Duck’s Painting Book (1925)
Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 (1928)
The Fairy Caravan (1929)
The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930)
Sister Anne (1932)
Wag-by-Wall (1944)
The Tale of the Faithful Dove (1955)

from The Tale of Pigling Bland

Practical Application

Beatrix Potter’s entire life was filled with observing, collecting, and recording nature — I imagine during those years which she studied fungi, making her 250 sketches, that perhaps math or Latin was neglected. She probably spent whole days immersed in her nature studies, getting back to academics again once a particular surge of creativity had passed.

Similar to Richard Doyle twenty years earlier, Beatrix Potter’s published works were a refinement of her illustrated letters which she sent to young friends, and her journal writing certainly must have been a further extension of the creative process.

N.C. Wyeth grew up in New England and as a child developed a love of nature.

My brothers and I were brought up on a farm, and from the time I could walk I was conscripted into doing every conceivable chore that there was to do about the place. This early training gave me a vivid appreciation of the part the body plays in action. Now, when I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute bodily sense of the muscle-strain, the feel of the hickory handle, or the protective bend of head and squint of eye that each pose involves.

Wyeth’s mother encouraged his early artistic talents, but his father preferred that he pursue the more practical trade of drafting. At age 20, Wyeth began studying under Howard Pyle where he learned Pyle’s rule of painting from experience, rather than the standard endless routine of copying from the classic plaster cast and drawing from the model. Pyle sought to teach his students to “paint living pictures rather than dead, inert matter in which there was not one single spark of real life.” Within a year of studying with Pyle, Wyeth had his first illustration published — the February, 1903, cover for The Saturday Evening Post (painting of a bronco buster). Over his lifetime, Wyeth produces nearly 4000 artworks for books (including many classics), magazines, calendars, posters, murals, and even maps for the National Geographic Society. Most of his work was done in oils, although the last ten years of his life he worked in egg tempera.

He and his wife Carolyn had five children: Henriette, Carolyn, Nathaniel, Ann, and Andrew. Each of the children became distinguished in their individual careers. Wyeth was an extraordinary and enthusiastic father, always curious. Family was very important to him and he took a personal interest in the training of his children.

We make a great deal of these simple experiences [walking through the countryside with his small children]. I believe them to be the real foundation of one of the most profound ethical ideas in regard to early training, to obtain the utmost of pleasure and inspiration for the simplest and homeliest events of the life about us.

Walks through the countryside were a family habit, with the goal of discovering and exploring the wonders of nature, and Wyeth’s natural curiosity about everything was clearly communicated to his children, which in turn helped to develop their own creativity. Daughter Ann remembers that her father would sit for hours on the front porch studying the changing lights and shadows as they passed over the sea and landscape.

The Wyeths sent their young children to a nearby Montessori school, which at that time was quite a rarity. As the children grew older, and public education proved unacceptable, Wyeth took them out of the formal classroom setting and hired tutors.

Every mother’s son of us is born with that supreme gift of individual perception, but the sheeplike tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child’s unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity.

All five of the Wyeth children were individually tutored and freed from the “menace of all organized schools and colleges.” The Wyeth children’s education was rigorous.

All the ‘natural’ talents of youth cannot take the place of disciplined training. Beethoven was a prodigy as a boy pianist, but witness the infinite and painstaking training which followed his initial flowering. Without this exhaustive discipline we would not have had the Beethoven of the nine symphonies.

Henriette (married Peter Hurd, a student of her father’s), Carolyn, and Andrew worked with their father in his studio for several hours each day and each went on to become well-known artists. Ann (married John W. McCoy, a student of her father’s) studied piano with a tutor and went on to become an artist and composer. Nathaniel’s interests as a boy were in the direction of mechanical structure and he went on to become a design engineer.

Wyeth required his students to study basic geometric forms first, mastering these simple tasks, before moving on to still life and then landscapes. He believed that knowledge came first, then creative interpretation. Wyeth would often advise young artists.

The genuineness of the artist’s work depends upon the genuineness of the artist’s living. In other words, art is not what you do, it is what you are. We cannot in art produce a fraction more than what we are.

Practical application
A good artist is not produced by merely sitting in a room drawing pictures. To encourage the creativity in your young artist, give him experiences from which to draw on: allow him to raise and train animals; make collections of quantities of specimens from nature; observe people, places, and things; work hard; and play freely.

Examples of work Wyeth did for Scribner (25 in all):

Treasure Island 1911 Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sampo 1912 James Baldwin
Kidnapped 1913 Robert Louis Stevenson
The Black Arrow 1916 Robert Louis Stevenson
The Boy’s King Arthur 1917 Sidney Lanier
The Mysterious Island 1918 Jules Verne
The Last of the Mohicans 1919 James Fenimore Cooper
Westward Ho 1920 Charles Kingsley
The Scottish Chiefs 1921 Jane Porter
Poems of American Patriotism 1922 Brander Matthews, ed.
David Balfour 1924 Robert Louis Stevenson
The Deerslayer 1925 James Fenimore Cooper
Michael Strogoff 1927 Jules Verne
Drums 1928 James Boyd
Jinglebob 1930 Philip Ashton Rollins
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come 1931 John Fox, Jr
The Yearling 1939 Majorie Kinnan Rawlings

Examples of work Wyeth did for other publishers:

The Long Roll 1911 Mary Johnston, Houghton Mifflin
Pike County Ballads 1912 John Hay, Houghton Mifflin
Cease Firing 1912 Mary Johnston, Houghton Mifflin
War 1913 John Luther Long, Bobbs-Merrill
The Mysterious Stranger 1916 Mark Twain, Harpers
Robin Hood 1917 Paul Creswick, David McKay
The Courtship of Miles Standish 1920 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Houghton Mifflin
Robinson Crusoe 1920 Daniel Defoe, Cosmopolitan
Rip Van Winkle 1921 Washington Irving, David McKay
The White Company 1922 Arthur Conan Doyle, Cosmopolitan
Legends of Charlemagne 1924 Thomas Bullfinch, Cosmopolitan
The Odyssey of Homer 1929 George Herbert Palmer, Houghton Mifflin
Men of Concord 1936 Henry David Thoreau, Houghton Mifflin

English illustrator Richard (Dickie) Doyle, educated at home by a tutor (a Mr. Street) and by his father John Doyle who was a leading political cartoonist during the early 19th century, followed in his father’s footsteps and was hired by the British humor magazine Punch at age nineteen.

Richard was a favorite illustrator of the Victorian era and is best known for designing the cover of Punch (which was used from 1849 until 1954) and for illustrating many children’s books. His drawings of elves and fairies were, and still are, especially popular. Richard was the uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Richard’s father, who had six children besides Richard, all artistic in some way, believed that an artist should learn to draw through accurate observation and memory instead of through academic training. Mr. Doyle encouraged his children to keep abreast of current events in London by attending ceremonies, reviews, and processions, then writing about their observations and illustrating their notes.

Then, each Sunday, the family would examine each others week’s work. Richard started a pictorial diary in 1840, when he was fifteen, and this diary Journal Kept by Richard Doyle in the Year 1840 — which includes several hundred miniature sketches and is in its original uncorrected form — can be read today.

In addition, John Doyle and his sons wrote weekly letters to one another (probably a requirement of the father), each illustrated with cartoon drawings. Some of these letters are held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. “These letters from Doyle to his father I see as a sort of apprenticeship for the younger Doyle, because he was on his way to becoming one of the best-known illustrators of the 19th century,” said Christine Nelson, the curator of literary and historical manuscripts. She said that these letters show “what manuscripts reveal about the creative process, and how they often come out of close relationships.” (quotes taken from the New York Times, May 14, 2006). In one letter, dated 1843, Richard writes his father, “I desperately depicted small devils playing all manner of games round this very page in the hope of deminishing [sic] the space for writing.”

The same year that he started his diary, Richard’s father asked him to illustrate a “History of Belgium.” Here is an excerpt from Richard’s illustrated diary. “… I am in a very critical state, working away at The History of Belgium which I must either have done by tomorrow morning or give Papa a shilling, so therefore I am working desperately, resolved not to go to bed till I have finished the illustrations…..Well now this is all very pleasant. I have won half a crown. Papa liked the illustrations which was also pleasant…”

1840 was also the year his father had one of Richard’s large pictures professionally printed (only fifty copies), which greatly encouraged Richard in his artistic work.

Practical Application

What ideas from the Doyle family can we use in our homeschool?

We can use Mr. Doyle’s idea of assigning to our student the task of keeping an illustrated journal. The kind of book Dickie Doyle used to write in is not mentioned, but there are plenty of options available to us in the form of bound, blank books, both lined and unlined. Notice the scheduled Sunday shows where everyone displayed and discussed the work done that past week, including illustrated letters written to one other.

And, finally, notice the wisdom of the father in publishing, at his own expense, one of Dickie’s works. In his journal, you can read about how much this encouraged the young Dickie, and you can follow his efforts at “marketing” the copies. Today it is an easy matter for us to take one of our children’s drawings or essays down to the local print shop and have 50 copies printed. It’s money well spent.

Did you notice what else Mr. Doyle used as incentive for work completed?