Anthropomorphism
Animals, plants and objects given human bodies, clothes, manners or feelings.
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About
Anthropomorphism gives animals, plants or things human manners: they walk upright, wear clothes, argue, read or fall in love. It is one of art's oldest jokes and one of its sharpest tools for satire, since a creature can say what a person cannot. Japan's Chōjū-giga scrolls, painted in the 12th and 13th centuries, show hares, frogs and monkeys wrestling and playing at religious rites.
In 18th-century France, Christophe Huet decorated rooms at the Château de Chantilly with singeries, monkeys dressed and behaving as courtiers. J. J. Grandville's caricatures of the 1820s to 1840s put animal heads on Parisian types, a device picked up by children's books from Beatrix Potter to Babar, the elephant king created by Jean de Brunhoff in 1931 and continued by his son Laurent. Tom Otterness carries the habit into public sculpture with small, round-bodied bronze figures.
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Bedrooms and Bathrooms
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Body Parts
Caricatures and Parody
Celebrity
Censorship
Childhood
City Scenes
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