Some paintings become bigger than themselves. Not many, admittedly. But a tiny minority slip out of the frame, drip off the canvas and enter public consciousness. Most paintings are things you see on a wall somewhere, and that’s all they are. But paintings like Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, the ‘Mona Lisa’ or Warhol’s ‘Soup Cans’ end up on tea towels and pencil cases, they get used in films, referenced in poetry, worn on T-shirts and they becoming cultural commodities way beyond works of art.
The difference between those paintings and Sir Edwin Landseer’s ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ is that he was alive to see his work’s viral spread. The proud, dignified royal stag, standing in a mist-cloaked Scottish mountainscape, was one of the most popular works of art of its time. It was a favourite of Queen Victoria’s and it was reproduced in countless ways, consumed en masse. Then it became the emblem of Glenfiddich whisky, the logo of Challenge Butter, a brand of Nestlé bottled water and a major US insurance company. It’s the ultimate proto-meme, a single image shared and adapted so many times that it became something more than a painting.
Which is good, because as a painting, it’s not the greatest. It’s fine, really. The stag seems a little chunky and ill-defined, and the rest of the picture plane is a bit of a wishy-washy mess. You can see why people liked it, though. It’s an English vision of Scottishness, full of a quiet, austere, stubborn nationalism. It’s a tartan shortbread of a painting.
But as a shareable – and shared – image, the work becomes interesting, because all of its meaning gets eclipsed by the work’s own ubiquity. What’s here doesn’t really matter, it’s what it transformed into for a mass audience that matters. If that reminds you of the strategies of pop art, it should. On the wall opposite ‘The Monarch’ hangs a recreation of it by pop maestro Peter Blake. I like it better as a painting than Landseer’s; its landscape is stronger and more evocative, the stag is simplified and nobler as a result. Blake saw Landseer’s painting for what it was: a very early step towards art as popular culture.