Animals as subjects in British Art
Animals have a long tradition in English art, today there is a great fondness for pet portraits, although these tend to be of dogs, cats, birds and fish also get the honour have having their portrait painted for their devoted owner. However, in the past, animals didn’t tend to dominate the same high ground as they do today. Most animals were either worked or eaten. Animal portraits would feature the very best in their field of work, or the prime specimen for the dinner table.
Famous artists such as Stubbs celebrated the horse by painting portraits for proud owners of the steed that had just won a great race for them. In addition, rich owners of large estates that included livestock would have a portrait made of their prize bull or pig. At this time is was common for the artist to exaggerate the best attribute of the animal in question. We often see paintings of strange looking barrel shaped pigs with short legs and small heads, this is not the result of a bad artist, it was common for the parts that showed the animal at it’s best for the butcher, where exaggerated over other parts.
Animals have always been part of the landscape and treated as such, but it was the Victorians that started to romanticise the way animals were seen in art, paintings such as “Monarch of the Glen” by Landseer (1802 -1873), typify this. Landseer was celebrated for his paintings of animals, notably of horses and dogs, but it was his dog paintings that spanned the class divide, being loved by the working class as much as the noble elite. To ensure his expertise with the physical nature of all his animals, at a young age Landseer was encouraged to attend and perform animal dissections to find out about the muscular and skeletal structure. At this time you also see the rise in artists studying and painting wildlife, artists such as Archibald Thorburn (1836-1885) who dedicated himself to the study of Ornithology, creating many highly accurate paintings of wild birds.
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