by Jon Lackman | 1 May 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the catalogue to the current Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900, “the first serious, full-scale examination of the subject of animals in art [and] the first to incorporate scientific materials and concepts,” featuring “not only paintings, sculptures, and photographs, but also natural history displays, zoos, taxidermy, and book illustration,” we read that in the art of this period “gone were the set-piece compositions of devout religious scenes, and in their place came a wide variety of other themes, from the still life and the portrait to the landscape and, above all, to paintings in which animals moved in from the corners of canvases to take up central positions as the main subject” [emphasis added].
