I watched the Turner episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art this weekend. I was dumbfounded to see the painting above won accolades from the London art world in 1840. That is Edwin Landseer’s “Laying Down the Law”. If you showed this to me without any explanation of what it was I would think it was a joke.

I don’t pretend to have any eye for art, and fully admit to my own ignorance, but looking at this all I can think is it’s the British equivalent of Dogs Playing Poker. I just don’t see what point Landseer could possibly be trying to make. That got me to look at the rest of his collection. Prior to that I would have guessed the obvious and said this painting poked fun at lawyers. Yet it seems all his paintings revolve around animals and he’s done a number of anthropomorphized animal paintings. Is he making fun of everyone with these paintings? It all just looks like kitsch to me. Landseer is the painter for little old ladies.