To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria’s favourite artist, this week’s choice of picture is his intriguingly peculiar Portrait of Mr Van Amburgh, as He Appeared with His Animals at the London Theatres, painted in 1847. My thanks go to the art historian and curator Stephen Duffy for calling my attention to the painting, and for sharing with me his fascinating research into the story that lies behind it
The subject of Landseer’s portrait was an itinerant American lion-tamer called Isaac Van Amburgh, popularly known as “Van Amburgh the Brute Tamer”, whose performances at Drury Lane and Astley’s Amphitheatre drew huge London audiences in the early months of 1839. One of Van Amburgh’s keenest admirers was the young Queen Victoria herself, who went to see his show at Drury Lane six times in as many weeks, on one occasion staying behind after the curtain fell to watch the big cats being fed. “One can never see it too often,” she wrote in her journal for 29 January 1839. “Van Amburgh … has great power over the animals, & they seem to love him, though they are in great fear of him. He took them by their paws, throwing them down & making them roar, & he lay upon them after enraging them.”
The Queen almost immediately commissioned Landseer, the most fashionable animal painter of the time, to paint a portrait of Van Amburgh performing his death-defying stage act. That painting is still in the Royal Collection today, but the work reproduced here, Landseer’s second and only other version of the subject, was painted a few years later for the Duke of Wellington. Wellington also greatly admired Van Amburgh, and was so delighted with Landseer’s portrait that he paid him £1000 for it, twice...
