Fierce Friends: Artists And Animals, 1750-1900

Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900 examines a critical period in our evolving relationship with animals. Between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment, the mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution, and the intellectual transformation sparked by Charles Darwin undermined many of the traditional roles assigned to animals, and overturned our view of them as physically, mentally - and divinely - separated from humans. This book interweaves the history of science and of art in an account of how humans came to understand and appreciate their shared biological ancestry.
Fierce Friends explores how painters, sculptors, illustrators, and ceramists reflected contemporary changes in the perception of animals, incorporating in their work the latest developments in geographical exploration and comparative anatomy, advances in geology and the birth of paleotology, the enthusiasm of amateur naturalists, and the impact of evolution theory. It identifies the importance of illustrators such as Audubon, who were frequently at the forefront of natural history discoveries, and reveals the visionary artists who drew imaginatively on Darwin's theory of natural selection to create mythical beasts. Artists as diverse as Hogarth, Oudry, Gericault, Delacroix, and Van Gogh here demonstrate mankind's increasing awareness of animals as sentient creatures, infusing genres such as animalier painting and portraiture with new meaning and emotional power.