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Landseer's Conversations with Friedrich Keyl in 1866-70
Book chapter

Landseer's Conversations with Friedrich Keyl in 1866-70

Barbara Larson
Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp.259-265
Nineteenth-Century Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain, Routledge, 1
2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003107835-50

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Abstract

Some of artist Edwin Landseer's conversations with Friedrich Keyl were recorded by the latter, in manuscripts that are now in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. Keyl, an animal painter and zoological illustrator, had been a pupil or studio assistant of Landseer and was often invited back to his house in the later 1860s. Keyl seems to have jotted down notes or 'memos' of their conversations after he got home, perhaps with the idea of writing a memoir of Landseer at a later stage. However, Keyl himself died in 1871, and none of the manuscripts were ever published. They are often very difficult to decipher and contextualise but do nevertheless throw light on Landseer's psychology and moods in his later years. The vitality, sociable charm, and humour of his youth and middle years had gradually given way to a bitterly cynical state of mind, an ingrained pessimism, and his passionate but conflicted feelings about wild animals took on a dark tone. Many of these conversations, often in the presence of other visitors, were gossip about the art world and high society, but Landseer's hostility to religion, his general cynicism, and his strong views on art and science also emerge.

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