Arnold Henry Savage Landor
1867–1924 · English painter, explorer and writer
Arnold Henry Savage Landor (c. 1865-1924) was an English painter, explorer and writer, grandson of the author Walter Savage Landor. He was born in Florence, where he spent his childhood, and at fifteen left for Paris to study at the Académie Julian. His significance lies in combining portraiture and landscape painting with travel accounts that described regions little known in Europe.
During his journeys he painted portraits and landscapes in Japan and Korea, where two princes of the Min clan gave him gifts. He later travelled to Tibet and Nepal, and in Peking he witnessed the victory parade after the Boxer Rebellion. He then rode on horseback through Persia and India, visited the Philippines and Abyssinia, where he painted King Menelik II, and undertook an expedition to the Mato Grosso in Brazil. His books, including In the Forbidden Land (1898) and Tibet and Nepal (1905), record these experiences.
During the First World War he took part in designing tanks and airships. He retired to Florence to write his memoirs and died there in 1924. His legacy is largely documentary, as his accounts and drawings offer a record of territories and peoples that were then barely known in Europe.