Sir Edwin Landseer, artist: autograph letter signed, thanking a patron for his purchase of his painting “The Highland Nurses”. May, 1856.

Manuscript in ink, 3 pp., octavo, written on the first three sides of a bifolium; dated May 24th 1856, and addressed simply ‘My dear Sir’, the letter is signed at the foot ‘Sincerely yours, E. Landseer’, with the artist’s address ‘1 St. John’s Wood [Road], Regent’s Park’ immediately below his signature; very well preserved and tipped onto a nineteenth-century album page (verso blank); the compiler of the album has annotated the page ‘Sir Edwin Landseer, Painter 1802-1873’.

Full transcription of the letter:

‘My dear Sir,

I have great pleasure in thanking you for your very kind note just received – and for the liberal amount you have sent in payment for the Picture intitled “Highland Nurses”, now exhibiting in the Royal Academy exhibition. Pray accept this hasty note as a formal receipt and acknowledgment of the safe arrival of your cheque for Eight Hundred pounds. When you again visit London I hope you will favour me with a calling and that you will kindly take the trouble to write me one line to say when.

Believe me, obliged and

Sincerely yours,

E. Landseer‘

Landseer had painted The Highland Nurses in 1854, and it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1856. He dedicated the work to Florence Nightingale: the poignant scene of an injured stag, accidentally shot by a bullet that Landseer had himself fired, being tended to by two does who lick his wound, later became a popular engraving.

Provenance: Autograph album compiled by Jane Emma Murphy (Balcombe) (1854-1924), “The Briars,” Mornington, Victoria (Australia); à Beckett family, Melbourne (by descent).