Animal

Animal is an art genre. The gallery holds 2,113 works in this genre, including works by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and Jacques-Louis David.

Animals are the oldest subject in the history of art. Long before humans depicted themselves with any consistency, Ice Age painters covered the limestone walls of Chauvet (c. 33,000–30,000 BCE) with lions, rhinoceroses and mammoths, and the caves of Lascaux (c. 17,000 BCE) with running horses, aurochs and stags. Yet animal painting as a distinct, self-respecting fine-art genre—rather than a religious symbol or hunting trophy—did not crystallise until the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, when a prosperous, largely Protestant market favoured worldly subjects observed from life over biblical and mythological grandeur.

The Dutchman Paulus Potter (1625–1654) is the genre's founding figure. His monumental *The Bull* (1647, Mauritshuis), nearly 3.4 metres wide, granted a life-sized format normally reserved for kings and saints to an ordinary farm animal, rendered with such acuity that flies settle on its hide and its damp muzzle gleams. This is the defining ambition of the genre: close, almost scientific observation of anatomy, coat, posture and behaviour, animals set convincingly within their landscape or habitat rather than posed as emblems.

In the nineteenth century the centre shifted to France, where the term *animalier* was coined—initially as an insult by Salon critics around 1831—for sculptors and painters of beasts. Antoine-Louis Barye (1795–1875), sketching predators at the Paris Jardin des Plantes alongside Delacroix, gave the movement its Romantic charge. Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) won international fame with *The Horse Fair* (1852–55, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a thundering Percheron market drawn from her own anatomical studies. In Britain, Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) became Queen Victoria's favourite with stags such as *The Monarch of the Glen* (c. 1851).

The genre also flowered in the Americas. Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) fused ornithology and lush exoticism in his *Gems of Brazil* hummingbird studies, including *Hummingbird and Passionflowers* (c. 1875–85), while Hudson River School painters such as James M. Hart placed cattle within luminous American landscapes. At its most fantastical, Henri Rousseau imagined beasts he never saw, as in *The Equatorial Jungle* (1909, National Gallery of Art).

Animal painting overlaps with natural-history illustration, landscape and still life, and it endures today as wildlife art—a continuous tradition reaching, unbroken, back to the first marks made on a cave wall.