The Rise of Narrative Animal Painting in France and Germany, 1790-1880

Abstract

My dissertation argues that new theories of natural change and evolution in the early to mid-nineteenth century can be related to shifts in the Western European practice of animal painting during the same time period. The genre was fundamentally rethought in the nineteenth century, allowing animals to be featured as protagonists in narrative scenes of a kind once confined to grand-scale history painting. This study interweaves methods of art history and history of science, presenting artistic objects as forms of sensory knowledge that cannot be reduced to their informational content. Scientific illustrations and related media at this time were conversant with the stylistic concerns of academic painting, popular prints and other “non-scientific” imagery. The role played by anatomical instruction, natural history museums and other such institutions in the professional formation of artists whose production was deemed purely “aesthetic” in nature was likewise crucial. I address these issues in the artistic and intellectual contexts of France and Germany from the French Revolutionary period through the initial rise of Darwinism in the 1860s and 1870s. I contend that animal artists, both painters and illustrators, were operating within a continental print culture steeped in discourses of natural history and animal husbandry. In particular, I demonstrate how pre-Darwinian science, especially German Romantic approaches to natural history and early French iterations of evolutionary theory, embodied a growing preoccupation with species mutability. This fascination with hereditary shifts in organisms (often aided by human intervention) was prominently visualized in painted and printed depictions of both European livestock breeds and “exotic,” imported species. Chapter One sets forth the stakes for considering animal painting as a form of scientific knowledge and, conversely, treating scientific illustrations as aesthetic objects. Following this introduction, the four central chapters concentrate on works by animal genre specialists like Rosa Bonheur and Anton Braith, as well as artists such as Théodore Géricault and Adolph von Menzel, who were better known for human subject matter but also produced narrative animal tableaux. Chapter Two examines the relationship between the early professionalization of veterinary science in the late eighteenth century and the artistic preoccupation with the anatomy of horses, the quintessential militaristic, monarchical animal, focusing on Christian Bernhard Rode’s Berlin veterinary theater frescoes (1790) and Géricault’s Race of the Riderless Horses (1817) series of oil paintings. In Chapter Three we take up prints and paintings of a less glamorous animal––the cow/bull––whose economic significance was nevertheless vital to the French and German nations, as revealed by the popular cattle paintings of Rosa Bonheur and Anton Braith. Chapter Four considers the relationship of popular nineteenth century scientific book illustrations to the animal painting genre. Like period animal paintings, these illustrations shifted away from blank background specimen displays and towards a more elaborate, ecologically embedded representation of animal life. Chapter Five continues with this theme of the ecologically situated animal, examining the animal paintings of Gustave Courbet and Adolph von Menzel, who showed a deep interest in notions of habitat correspondent with the shift towards a more holistic view of animal life in the zoological sciences of the late nineteenth century.