So, I was looking up Edwin Landseer, and came across not only his painter brother Thomas — who went to learn under Haydon alongside**William Berwick**, who appears no relation to the better-known Thomas Berwick but was employed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the portraitist — but also his painting of some polar bears making a snack of dead explorers [ no, I don’t know if polar bears eat carrion, but they don’t strike one as fussy eaters ] entitled: Man Proposes, God Disposes which is a quote from the German theologian Thomas à Kempis who lived to 91, son of a schoolmistress and whose volume The Imitation of Christ — recommended by the rascal Sir Thomas More — I had since the age of six, but never got around to reading.
The painting is owned by Royal Holloway College — and is covered over during exams since it hath the ability to drive students mad ( Landseer himself died insane ) — which was founded as a chicks-only institution by Thomas Holloway, Maker of Patent Medicines, in 1879. Holloway [* (he had an unconcealed prejudice against doctors, lawyers and parsons)* Wiki ] owned paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and purchased Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian pile that later belonged to Thomas Hermann Lowinsky, ‘the former general manager of the Hyderabad (Deccan) Co coal mines in India’, and then to some pop stars.
This one goes out to all the Thomases out there.