Listening to Landseer's Polar Bears

Abstract

This essay adjusts the reading of one of Edwin Landseer's best-known paintings, Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864), to place its animal protagonists at centre stage. Analysis of the painting has tended to focus on its relation to the lost Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1845, and its mordant depiction of humankind's vanity in the face of a harsh Nature, symbolically embodied by the two polar bears attacking the wreckage of a boat. Departing from the usual interpretation of these bears as terrifying wild beasts, the essay takes certain jarring and abject elements in their representation as a prompt to explore the artist's probable use of living polar bears in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London as models. It investigates the animal biography of the polar bears living in the Gardens over an approximately 50-year span, examining their routes into and highly compromised lives within the Zoo, and seeks to recover their agency and experience as specific historical individuals. The polar bears’ “voices”, as manifested in their behaviour, illuminate a little-examined aspect of the experience of translocated Arctic creatures who lived as captives in Britain in a “contact zone” between humans and animals. Speculating on the impact these particular bears had on contemporary visitors, including Landseer and the viewers of Man Proposes, God Disposes, the essay suggests that they bring a destabilizing animal presence to the painting which still “speaks” to us today.