Monkey

Monkey is a subject in art. The gallery holds 91 works in this subject in art, including works by Lodewijk Tieling, El Greco and Hans Memling.

Few animals have carried as heavy a symbolic load in Western art as the monkey, prized precisely because it seems to mimic humanity while falling short of it. In medieval manuscripts the ape capers through the margins as a "thoughtless imitator," aping knights, nuns and physicians to expose human vanity, gluttony and folly; Christian writers, troubled by a creature so nearly human yet not, cast it as a figure of the sinner and even of the devil. An ape clutching an apple alluded to the Fall, while a chained monkey embodied the soul fettered by base desire. The Renaissance complicated this morality. The phrase *ars simia naturae*—"art is the ape of nature"—turned the copycat into an emblem of the artist who studies and imitates creation, and monkeys, increasingly arriving in Europe as exotic diplomatic gifts and aristocratic pets, came to personify the five senses and worldly curiosity.

Out of this tradition grew the *singerie* ("monkey trick"), a genre of pictures in which monkeys dressed as people perform human roles. Pieter van der Borcht established it as an independent theme around 1575, and Flemish masters such as David Teniers the Younger, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Abraham Teniers made it a recognised category. It flowered in eighteenth-century Rococo France: Christophe Huet covered the walls of the Grande Singerie at the Château de Chantilly (c. 1737, for the prince de Condé) with monkeys soldiering and tightrope-walking amid chinoiserie, while Chardin's *Le Singe peintre* mocked the artist himself. Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps revived the satire in *The Experts* (1837; Metropolitan Museum), where bewigged apes appraise a Poussin-style landscape—a barb aimed at the Académie jury that had rejected him.

The monkey is equally central to Asian art. The Hindu warrior-god Hanuman of the *Ramayana* and the Chinese trickster Sun Wukong of the sixteenth-century *Journey to the West* anchor vast devotional and narrative traditions, while ink painters of China and Japan prized the long-armed gibbon as an image of unworldly grace. In Buddhist painting monkeys appear among the grieving animals of *nehan-zu* scenes of the Buddha's death—as in works held in this collection.

The theme persisted into modernism. Henri Rousseau's dreamlike *The Equatorial Jungle* (1909; National Gallery of Art) sets a macaque and tailed gibbons peering from invented foliage, fusing the exotic-pet fascination with naïve fantasy. From marginalia to Surrealist forebears, the monkey has remained art's mirror to humankind—at once double, parody and prey.