![]() “ welcomed him as a constant visitor both at this studio and also at his hospitable home. I would criticize his work, and make him correct defects before we left the spot.” Īs Landseer became more proficient and skillful he attracted the attention of Benjamin Robert Haydon, a British artist who specialized in grand historical pictures. and remain until I fetched him in the afternoon. After this we came on several occasions, and as he grew older this was one of his favourite spots for sketching. He was very young … not more than six or seven years old. … It was a favourite walk with my boys and one day when I had accompanied them, Edwin stopped by this stile to admire some sheep and cows … At his request I lifted him over and finding a scrap of paper and pencil in my pocket I made him sketch a cow. “Many a time have I lifted him over this very stile. ![]() Of these early times, Eliza Meteyard recorded what Landseer’s father once said to a neighbor as they were walking: Landseer’s artistic talents were also nurtured and encouraged by his father, who frequently sent him into the fields to draw sheep, goats, and donkeys. True, I have very little hair but then you have very little feet.Sir Edwin Landseer self-portrait. ‘I will wash your feet with my tears and dry them with my hair. Having once slighted Lady Hardinge, he offered this irresistible apology: They served a drink called the Comeback - a testament, perhaps, to his legendary wit. Till a few years ago, the corner of Shoe Lane & Fleet Street displayed a discreet sign - Lutyens Bar. If anything, he would have wanted the commission. He was, above all, an architect in search of his next job. Without doubt, Edwin Landseer Lutyens would have been astonished at the concerted effort being made to preserve the buildings that have long outlived their purpose. However, we need to collectively make the intellectual distinction between preserving the Central Vista for its ecology and urban public land (which we must), and retaining the buildings for posterity (which we need not). In India, as the central government plans to reimagine the Central Vista and surrounding buildings in a strength of ambition not seen since the hubris of the British, it is tempting to raise the work of Lutyens and put it on a pedestal for conservation. Lutyens, for his part, detested the notion that buildings need to be about ideas and words, saying, "All this talk brings the ears so far forward that they make blinkers for the eyes”.īust of Edwin Landseer Lutyens Image Credit: Amit Khanna Around the world, architects were rejecting the ‘florid confections of Victorianism’ (from William Dalrymple) and inventing a new language of contemporary architecture. His contemporaries, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Charles Holden (not to mention Voysey) were inventing a new typology of architectural language in England that would form the genesis of the arts and craft movement. Unlike his contemporary architects who that were reimagining the world around them with the tools of modernity, Lutyens was steadfast in his approach to “producing” buildings with meticulous efficiency, seeing himself more as Bernini and less as Borromini. There is an element of whimsy in his oeuvre, a lack of intellectual rigour that plagues his adoring biographers and critics alike. Yet, his work stubbornly resists architectural comprehension. Sociologist, urban planner and architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens Image Credit: Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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