[ Gentleman's Magazine ]
The Gentleman's Magazine was an important and influential monthly magazine in the 18th and 19th Centuries; it began in 1731, ceased regular publication in 1907, and shut down completely in 1922.
The March, 1862 edition carried the obituary of the English sculptor Matthew Wyatt, who passed away on January 10 of 1862. If you've spent any time in the "Fine Arts" section of The Cultured Newf, you have probably seen Wyatt's famous sculpture of Bashaw, the Newfoundland dog belonging to the Earl of Dudley.
Bashaw has a notable presence in the cultural history of Newfoundlands, for in addition to being sculpted by Wyatt, he was also painted by Sir Edwin Landseer, whose 1827 work commonly known as Off to the Rescue is in fact formally titled Bashaw, the Property of the Right Honorable Earl of Dudley.
Bashaw was also directly mentioned twice in The Times (London): once, in 1829, when the Earl somehow managed to lose Bashaw and posted a "lost dog" notice (Bashaw obviously was found), and again in 1834 when the subject of this obituary, the sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt, announced that the statue of Bashaw was available for viewing, for a modest fee. This was probably an attempt by Wyatt to recoup some of the cost of the statue of Bashaw, for the Earl died before the statue was paid for, and the executors of his estate argued with Wyatt about the fee. Wyatt in fact was never paid for the work, which eventually found its way to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Later, Bashaw's name was invoked multiple times in advertisments posted in The Times by the hucksterish dog seller J. S. Pardy, who claimed to have for sale puppies sired by "the Great Bashaw." I find such claims suspect, as the original Bashaw would have been at least 9 or 10 years old by this time. Pardy also claims to have "the Young Bashaw" for sale, so it could be that this dog was the father of those puppies. Pardy, regrettably, was no model of scrupulousness.
At any rate, here's what the Gentleman's Magazine obituary of Matthew Cotes Wyatt, "the emininent sculptor" who, sadly, the obituary reports as "now partially forgotten," had to say about Newfies. After mentioning a number of Wyatt's more famous sculptures, the writer claims that
But perhaps in no single subject did Mr. Wyatt ever succeed more thoroughly than in his statue of "Bashaw," the favourite Newfoundland dog of the late Earl of Dudley, to whom Lord Byron alludes in the following lines: —
"See the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend:
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone." (372)
Those lines of poetry are of course from Lord Byron's "Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog." The obituary writer's sloppy grammar implies that Byron wrote those lines about either Bashaw or the Earl of Dudley.
