The Arts In Berwick -- Visual Arts -- Painting
Noble Flesh

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As well as notable architects, the richer families in the area commissioned portraits from some of the leading artists of the day. Lady Waterford's beauty was caught in paint many times. Grandest of all being the 1845 portrait by Sir Francis Grant (1803-78) now in the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1871 Grant was commissioned by the tenants of Chillingham to paint the 6th.Earl of Tankerville. This was presented at a feast to celebrate the coming of age of the Earl's son in January 1872. An account of the event survives and we learn that in addition to much drinking and speechifying, the guests dined on two barons of beef from the Chillingham wild herd of oxen.

Rare survivors of an ancient species of cattle, the Chillingham herd, has been an object of fascination for visitors and artists for several centuries. Newcastle wood-engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) depicted one of the bulls, Thomas Allom (1804-73) a bull hunt and in 1836 Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73) painted a dead bull at the feet of the Earl of Tankerville.

Landseer had been a child prodigy, much given to painting dogs, until he went to Scotland in 1824. He met Sir Walter Scott and may have stayed at Chillingham. The trip had a profound effect upon him -- thereafter Landseer was fascinated by stags and the Scottish landscape, his "Monarch of the Glen" (1851) being probably the best known of all Victorian paintings.

Much the same heroic quality as this famous picture is to be seen in his 1867 painting of three Chillingham cattle which, together with his and Grant's Tankerville portraits, had pride of place at the unveiling dinner in 1872.