Natural History

A painting of a Landseer by Landseer

One of the rather interesting aspects of looking into dogs is how unusual some of these distinctions can be. Most dog fanciers are splitters rather than lumpers when it comes to their peculiar taxonomy.

No better example of this tendency to split apart gene pools is the tradition of the FCI to regard the Landseer Newfoundland as its own distinct breed. In Canada, the US, and the UK, this is just a color variety of Newfoundland.

The Landseer dogs are named for Sir Edwin Landseer, who portrayed many of these black and white animals in his work. In the nineteenth century, the black and white varieties were far more common among Newfoundland dogs that were living in the United States and Europe.

Custer captured a black and white Newfoundland during the Peninsula Campaigin in 1862. This dog had been accompanying a Confederate company.

These dogs were much closer in build and appearance to retrievers, although these dogs were often considerably larger. In  Europe, the bigger the Newfoundland the better, so most Europeans knew the Newfoundland as a giant, black and white dog.

I should note here that even the larger strain of Newfoundland was used as a gundog. They can be taught to retrieve, although their modern variant is a rather slow swimmer. In nineteenth and eighteenth century texts, any dog that swam and came from Newfoundland was either called  a Newfoundland or Labrador. Different people had different names for the various strains imported from the island of Newfoundland, so it gets rather confusing to determine which strain writers are referring to. As a result, I tend to think of them as starting out as variants of the same basic Landrace that later evolved into separate breeds. This is a bit of heresy, because almost all texts talk about the two different strains endemic to the island. However, I think the tendency to see differences is a bit misleading. These dogs evolved out a diverse soup imported European dogs, and the fact that some of the large ones could also be used for hauling carts and the smaller ones were good at retrieving shot birds and seals is what actually led to their separation. In Europe, they were interbred, and both strains played a role in developing the retrievers.

So in the nineteenth century, the term Newfoundland could either refer to the St. John’s water dog (the one that looks a lot like a retriever) or the big Newfoundland, which was almost always black and white and was not as exaggerated as the modern breed is. It is likely that interbreeding between the types and selective breeding resulted in a third type of dog, the largely solid colored Newfoundland. Emily Dickinson had one of these dog, a brown/liver/ “bronze” dog named “Carlo.” The royal family also had a solid black Newfoundland named “Nero” in the 1860’s.  It is this type of dog that became more and more popular in Europe and in the United States. There became a tendency to breed for more strongly molosser features in these dogs than in the strains that produced the Landseer, and as a result, the Newfoundland became a sort of mastiff-retriever, which is basically what it was before, except that it now possessed a bit more mastiff in its background and behavior.

When the Newfoundland became rather unpopular towards the beginning of the twentieth century, the Landseer dogs nearly disappeared. After World War II, when the population really dropped off, the breed was revitalized through imported Newfoundlands from Switzerland and Italy. Most of these dogs were of the solid colored and heavier variety.

However, in Europe a few of these lighter-built, “old-fashioned,”  black and white dogs still existed and were bred in separate gene pool. These dogs looked like the old retriever-type Newfoundlands of the nineteenth century, and these dogs were called Landseers.  Today, in the FCI countries, Landseer are lightly-built black and white Newfoundlands. They are not as lightly-built as they once were, but they are not the big-boned Newfoundlands that currently exist in the breed.

This is a modern FCI Landseer.

Now, in the countries where this breed is a color variety of the Newfoundland, the dogs have to be bred back to solid black dogs to retain type. Breeding Landseers with typical modern Newfoundland conformation together for several generations will very often lead to dogs that have FCI Landseer conformation.

A modern Newfoundland with Landseer coloration.

So when British and North American dog fanciers say Landseer, they actually refer to a modern Newfoundland that is black and white. When FCI dog fanciers say Landseer, they mean the lightly-built dog that represented the large Newfoundland breed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.