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Sunday 19 April 2020

Sir Edwin Landseer and the Trafalgar Square lions




The lions in Trafalgar Square, London, were created by the Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer in 1867. There is an interesting story behind how they came to look the way they do.

Sir Edwin Landseer 

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73) was perhaps a strange choice when it came to awarding the commission for the four bronze lions that adorn the foot of Nelson’s column in London’s Trafalgar Square. He was primarily a painter, not a sculptor, although he was certainly renowned as a painter of animals. Apart from that, he was highly favoured by Queen Victoria, which might have had something to do with it.

Sir Edwin’s problem

The main problem he had was how he was going to be able to produce a reasonable representation of a lion when he did not have a model to work from. He originally asked for a cast of a stone lion in Turin to be sent to him, but the delays involved were far too long and he needed to get to work in a hurry.

Fortunately (from his point of view, not that of the beast in question), one of the lions at London Zoo had just died, so Landseer asked for the corpse to be sent to his studio. He had worked in this way before, when painting the dead lion for the design that appears to this day on tins of “Lyle’s golden syrup”, but this time he needed the lion to appear to be alive!

It was therefore propped up in his studio for him to get all the measurements and angles correct, although he had to work fairly quickly due to the unpleasant smells that came from the decomposing remains.

When the Turin lion eventually arrived, Landseer was doubtless highly relieved – casts of stone lions are much less offensive to the nostrils than rapidly decaying dead ones – but it would appear that the sculptor of the Turin lion was not as good as Landseer had been led to believe.

The net result, given Landseer’s previous experience of painting pet dogs, plus the somewhat unreliable models that he was forced to work from, is that the lions that were erected in Trafalgar Square in 1867 are far from realistic. Their pose is more like that of dogs begging for a morsel rather than that adopted by beasts of the African plains.

However, the lions have never ceased to be popular, and it is not easy to get a photo of one without a tourist sitting on its back!

© John Welford

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