Animal

Animal is a subject in art. The gallery holds 75 works in this subject in art, including works by Sesson Shūkei, Edward Hicks and Kawanabe Kyōsai 河鍋暁斎.

Animals are among the very oldest subjects of human art, predating writing, agriculture, and settled life. The painted and engraved beasts of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, reliably dated to roughly 33,000–30,000 years ago, include some eighty creatures—among them thirty-six lions and twenty-three rhinoceroses—rendered with a sophistication once thought impossible so early. At Lascaux, painted around 15,000 years ago, more than 600 images of horses, bison, and deer cover the walls. From these beginnings the animal recurs across nearly every culture: in Egyptian deities, Scythian and Celtic "animal style" metalwork, Chinese bird-and-flower painting, and the menageries of medieval bestiaries and manuscript margins.

For much of the Western tradition, animal painting ranked low in the academic hierarchy of genres, beneath history, portraiture, and even landscape. Yet artists repeatedly elevated it. Albrecht Dürer treated the animal as a worthy subject in its own right: his watercolour Young Hare (1502) carries his proud monogram, while his famous woodcut Rhinoceros (1515)—drawn from a written report of a beast he never saw—became one of the most reproduced images in Europe.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the great specialists. George Stubbs, trained in dissection, painted Whistlejacket (c. 1762), a lifesize rearing racehorse against bare gold ground that reads as both anatomical triumph and a prefiguration of Romanticism. Rosa Bonheur won international fame with The Horse Fair (1855), and Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria's favourite, gave Victorian audiences moralising, anthropomorphic scenes such as Monarch of the Glen.

In the modern era the animal became a vehicle for spiritual and formal experiment. Franz Marc, co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter, used the beast as a purer being than man, his Blue Horse I (1911) deploying colour symbolically rather than descriptively. American folk painting offers its own visionary strain in Edward Hicks, the Quaker preacher who painted more than a hundred versions of the Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1820–1849), illustrating Isaiah's prophecy of wolf and lamb at rest; the catalogue's Hicks holding, The Falls of Niagara, shares that emblematic, didactic spirit. Together these works trace the animal's passage from sacred presence to scientific specimen to modern symbol.