Man Proposes, God Disposes. Edwin Landseer. 1864. Oil on canvas. 91.4 x 243.7 cm. Courtesy of Royal Holloway, University of London

Landseer’s famous painting, made in reference to the loss of John Franklin’s fatal expedition to find the North-West Passage in 1845, is a mournful and haunting reflection on human vanity. It is also a fantasy of the Arctic. The British animal painter never set foot anywhere near the location he painted, but there are traces of his encounters with some very real Arctic presences at the centre of the painting: the living polar bears then kept in London Zoo, whose stories have as yet played little part in discussions of the painting.  

London Zoo had staged an almost continuous exhibition of polar bears since 1829. Until 1949, when one of its bear cubs at last survived infancy, every one of these had been born wild in the Arctic, forcibly captured and transported to Britain. The two who probably modelled for Landseer were a female (purchased 1846, died 1880) and a male (purchased 1850, died 1867), both bought from the owner of a whaling ship, John Hutchison of Peterhead, at the time Britain’s principal whaling and sealing port. As contemporary Britons were well aware, whalers regularly capitalised on chance encounters with polar bears, shooting them for sport, taking skins and shooting protective mothers in order to capture live cubs.  

Once at the Zoo, the polar bears lived in a small concrete enclosure, the inadequacies of which are starkly revealed in the LL postcard also in this exhibition. The female bear who may have modelled for Landseer endured an incredible 33 years in this cage. The bears swam in their ‘pond’, basked, interacted with the public and must have impressed and delighted many visitors, but there were clear signs that all was not well, including the loss of five cubs born in 1862-66, all of whom died shortly after birth. Numerous references to the bears’ relentless pacing and other stereotypic behaviour (known as zoochosis and often displayed by captive animals with large territories in the wild) show that they were often bored and stressed. Some contemporaries who saw this were blasé, but others were dismayed. In 1869, one newspaper called on zoos to reform: ‘We are all tired of… dismal menagerie cages. The cramped walk, the weary restless movement of the head… the bored look, the artificial habits…’ 

Did - does - knowledge of these animals’ lives affect how one sees the painting? Landseer’s polar bears have generally been discussed as terrifying monsters, metaphors for the implacable brutality of nature - but these are ambiguous portrayals, scavenging meagre bones and scrabbling at the ice; one reviewer memorably wrote that they ‘crouch and writhe, like monster ferrets’. These are uncanny, compromised portraits of historic individuals whose wild lives were obliterated by British actions in the Arctic. Once recognised as such, they have the power to shift our focus from the human narratives of the painting to its central living figures, and to what was done to them, and to thousands of other animals, during this period. 

Essay by Alison Wright