Animals
Creatures wild and domestic, real and symbolic, as they have appeared in art from prehistoric caves to the present.
20 works · 10 related artists
About
Animals were among the first things people drew, on cave walls from Sulawesi to southern France, and they have never left art since. They appear as prey and livestock, companions, emblems of gods and rulers, and mirrors for human behaviour. The Tang painter Han Gan made an emperor's horse the subject of Night-Shining White in the 8th century, and Albrecht Dürer's watercolour Young Hare (1502) catches every whisker.
Later European painters made animals a speciality. Paulus Potter painted The Young Bull (1647) nearly life-size, Rosa Bonheur studied at the Paris horse market for The Horse Fair (1852–55), and John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827–38) printed each bird at full scale. Modernists sought feeling rather than fact: Franz Marc painted blue horses in 1911 as symbols of the spiritual. Today Walton Ford borrows the manner of natural-history plates for large watercolours about empire and extinction.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Anthropomorphism
Antiquity as Subject
Architecture's Effects
Artist as Ethnographer
Atmospheric Landscapes
Attenuated Figure
Bars and Restaurants
Bathers
Bedrooms and Bathrooms
Bible Story
Body Parts
Caricatures and Parody
Celebrity
Censorship
Childhood
City Scenes
Cityscapes
Cityscapes and City Scenes
Classical Figure
Classical Mythology
