[ Hubbard / Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great ]
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) was an American author and publisher (who had the misfortune to be aboard the RMS Lusitania when it sank after being torpedoed by a German submarine during WWI). This 14-volume work was first published in 1900 by Roycroft Press (New York), founded by Hubbard. The excerpt below is from volume 4, Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters.
One of the houses visited and described by Hubbard is that of the Landseer family on Queen Anne Street in London (a street where the great English painter J. M. W. Turner lived and painted as an adult. Like Edwin Landseer, Turner was a child prodigy).
While Edwin Landseer is the most famous member of the family, both of Landseer's brothers (Thomas and Charles) and his father John were artists of some repute in their time, and his sister was also an accomplished artist although in classic Victorian manner she put off any thought of an artistic career in order to manage the household of Edwin, a life-long bachelor.
Then we find that there was once a curiosity exhibited in Fleet Street in the way of a lion-cub that had been caught in Africa and mothered by a Newfoundland dog. The old mother-dog thought just as much of the orphan that was placed among her brood as of her sure-enough children. The owner had never allowed the two animals to be separated, and when the lion had grown to be twice the size of his foster-mother there still existed between the two a fine affection.
The stepmother exercised a stepmother's rights, and occasionally chastised, for his own good, her overgrown charge, and the big brute would whimper and whine like a lubberly boy.
This curious pair of animals made a great impression on the Landseers. The father and three boys sketched them in various attitudes, and engravings of Edwin's sketch are still to be had.
Newfoundlands are mentioned one more time in the discussion of the Landseer family:
Gradually it dawned upon the father and the brothers that Edwin was their master so far as drawing was concerned. They could sketch a Newfoundland dog that would pass for anybody's Newfoundland, but Edwin's was a certain identical dog, and none other.
Edwin Landseer really discovered the dog.