Not only did Landseer rival some of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century in painting fur and feathers, but he depicted animals with sympathy, as if he believed that "the dumb, driven cattle" possess souls. His dogs and other animals are so human as to look as if they were able to speak. The painter was the son of John Landseer, the engraver, and was born in London. He received art lessons from his father, and, when little more than a baby, would sketch donkeys, horses, and cows at Hampstead Heath. Some of these sketches, made when Landseer was five, seven, and ten years old, are at Kensington. He was only fourteen when he exhibited the heads of _A Pointer Bitch and Puppy_. When between sixteen and seventeen he produced _Dogs fighting_, which was engraved by the painter's father. Still more popular was _The Dogs of St. Gothard rescuing a Distressed Traveller_, which appeared when its author was eighteen. Landseer was not a pupil of Haydon, but he had occasional counsel from him. He dissected a lion. As soon as he reached the age of twenty-four he was elected an A.R.A., and exhibited at the Academy _The Hunting of Chevy Chase_. This was in 1826, and in 1831 he became a full member of the Academy. Landseer had visited Scotland in 1826, and from that date we trace a change in his style, which thenceforth was far less solid, true and searching, and became more free and bold. The introduction of deer into his pictures, as in _The Children of the Mist_, _Seeking Sanctuary_, and _The Stag at Bay_, marked the influence of Scotch associations. Landseer was knighted in 1850, and at the French Exhibition of 1855 was awarded the only large gold medal given to an English artist. Prosperous, popular, and the guest of the highest personages of the realm, he was visited about 1852 by an illness which compelled him to retire from society. From this he recovered, but the effects of a railway accident in 1868 brought on a relapse. He died in 1873, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. On the death of Sir Charles Eastlake, in 1865, he was offered the Presidentship of the Royal Academy, but this honour he declined. In the National Gallery are _Spaniels of King Charles's Breed_, _Low Life and High Life_, _Highland Music_ (a highland piper disturbing a group of five hungry dogs, at their meal, with a blast on the pipes), _The Hunted Stag_, _Peace_ (of which we give a representation), _War_ (dying and dead horses, and their riders lying amidst the burning ruins of a cottage), _Dignity and Impudence_, _Alexander and Diogenes_, _The Defeat of Comus_, a sketch painted for a fresco in the Queen's summer house, Buckingham Palace. Sixteen of Landseer's works are in the Sheepshanks Collection, including the touching _Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner_, of which Mr. Ruskin said that "it stamps its author not as the neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as the man of mind."