Who painted this? #28

I was merrily starting this blog post when I noticed that the bottom right hand corner of the picture contained the artist's signature.  Whoops!  It doesn't any more!  Isn't Photoshop wonderful?

Who painted this? #28

How many times have artists painted peppers?  Is there a new way of painting peppers?  I'll be very interested to know how you get to this one.......

The answers will be posted in next week's Who painted this? #29

How to participate in "Who painted this? #27"

PLEASE make sure you read the rules before posting a comment - and ONLY POST ON THIS BLOG what you think is the answer.
Click this link to read THE RULES for participating in this challenge (this saves having to copy them out for each post!).

In short:

• use your brains not software to find the answer
• search using words only on a database of images
• leave your answer as a comment on this blog
• if correct it will not be published until the next post - which provides the answer
• if wrong it will be published
• do not leave the answer on Facebook!
• the winner - who gets a mention and a link on/from this blog - is the first person to give me a completely correct answer for ALL the things I want to know

Who Painted This #27 - The Answer

• Title of the artwork: Lion: A Newfoundland Dog
• Name of the artist who created this artwork: Sir Edwin Landseer RA (1802 - 1873 ) 
• Date it was created: 1824 
• Media used: oil on canvas; Height: 149.8 cm estimate, Width: 195.6 cm estimate, Weight: 115 kg
• Where it lives now: Victoria and Albert Museum

The V&A website states

The Newfoundland is a large Canadian working dog, capable of drawing a sledge, and celebrated for its intelligence, docility and swimming power. The dog's owner, W. H. de Merle, commissioned this painting. The artist based the background on landscape seen in Scotland.

It's referenced in a book which states the following

When this large painting was bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum in 1894, it joined nineteen other oil paintings by Landseer, including sixteen alone from the 1857 John Sheepshanks gift. But Lion was the most impressive acquisition, not least because of its sheer size. The painting was commissioned in 1824 by the dog's owner, W. H. de Merle, for fifty pounds. As a teenager Landseer had established himself as a precocious and prodigious talent, specialising in Scottish domestic subjects and animals, especially dogs. This is Landseer's earliest treatment of the Newfoundland breed, famous for its lifesaving abilities; a variety of the breed was even named after the painter. Landseer is even better known through his engravings of certain others of his Newfoundland paintings, including A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society of 1838 and Saved! of 1856. The subject appealed greatly to nineteenth-century taste, with its combination of animal magnificence and canine heroism. There is a story - unsupported by evidence - that this painting was dispatched in a large case to Paris during the Revolution (either of 1830 or 1848) and narrowly escaped being used as a barricade.

You can see more of his drawings of animals in the collection of the Royal Academy

Who guessed correct?

Congratulations to Mark (Learning to draw: Learning to see) who got the first complete correct answer first.

It would have been Colours and Textures - but she forgot to say where the painting is now.  The way I run this to be fair to everybody is that it's the first complete correct answer which gets highlighted.  I bet you won't forget that one again in a hurry!

It seems that as I suspected a lot of you guessed or knew who the artist was straight away.  While a number of people got there via the breed of dog - once they'd figured that out!

There were a lot of you who also got the correct answer were:

• bmcmadden had a very old book of Landseer drawings and thought the painting looked familiar, so looked up Landseer and there it was! 
• Sandra Robinson told me that a variety of the Newfoundland breed was named after Landseer
• BeanKitty Studio gave me the room in the V&A and the wall it was on!
• David Hawson knew who it was painted for
• Barbara Jackson knew the dog - she's been to Newfoundland and got splashed by a very wet one of these. 
• Roger Brown My Botswana Art was stumped by the breed of dog but got there in the end
• Carol Carbin got it straight away
• kate wilson remembered Landseer's painting of doggy feet from an old biscuit tin (this has got to be one of the more unusual "how did you get to the answer" answers!)
• Gabriele has has two Newfoundland dogs and is convinced every owner knows about Landseer!