Landseer’s Lions in Trafalgar Square

Just as everyone ignores the warning on packets of cotton buds not to stick them in your ear, so the signs forbidding climbing on the Trafalgar Square lions are more honoured in the breach than the observance.

There are four of these rather magnificent bronze beasts, aligned to the cardinal points of the compass, at the base of Nelson’s Column. They are the work of Victorian artist Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) and were installed in 1867, nearly a quarter of a century after the square was laid out and the column erected.

There had always been a plan to have lions around the column’s base, but a couple of false starts – the first sculptor turned the job down, the second had his models rejected – meant that their final commissioning was delayed.

Landseer seems to have been chosen because, although a painter not a sculptor, many of his most famous works were of animals, and he was also a great favourite of Queen Victoria, who had knighted him in 1850.

He had painted portraits of royal horses and dogs, as well as of the queen and her family, and was well known for his Highland scenes (and Victoria loved all things Scottish). He also had at least a partial track record in the lion representation stakes, his 1849 painting ‘The Desert’ showing one of the king of the beasts dead on a rocky outcrop.

There was a plaster cast of a (stone) lion in Turin that was requested for Landseer to base his models on, but delays in this arriving meant that he had to make sketches at the zoo. When one of the zoo lions died he was able to obtain the corpse to study more closely (like many painters of the time, Landseer had dissected animals so that his work could be anatomically correct).

Unfortunately the beast decomposed more quickly than Landseer was able to study it, so the Trafalgar Square lions are less than 100% accurate; the paws are those of a domestic cat and the line of the backs is concave when it should (apparently) be convex.

Landseer worked on the lions in collaboration with the French-Italian sculptor Baron Carlo Marchetti, in whose Kensington studio the lions were cast. (Marchetti was also popular with Victoria and Albert – he had done sculptures of them and his ‘Richard Coeur de Lion’ stands outside Parliament.)

The National Portrait Gallery has a painting by John Ballantyne of Landseer at work in Marchetti’s studio on one of the preparatory clay models of the lions. This portrait caused a row with Landseer who didn’t want the work to be displayed publicly until after the unveiling of the finished sculptures as advance knowledge of the design would reduce the impact that he hoped to create.

Despite there also being a fractious relationship between Landseer and Marchetti, the Royal Academy has a bust that the latter did of the former in 1867, possibly to celebrate the success of their work together.

For more London leonine sculptures, read my post on the South Bank Lion that stands on Westminster Bridge.

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