Maybe this frog wouldn’t look so happy if it could read what George Shaw wrote about it in its accompanying description: “Should inquiry be made, which is the ugliest animal yet known to exist? The creature here represented might perhaps with justice be proposed as an answer: an animal of…
Rock art in northern Australia depicts marsupial lions, giant kangaroos and other megafauna that populated the Land Down Under long ago. Read: Cave paintings reveal what extinct animals may have looked like
It’s #WorldLionDay! So, which medieval lion are you today? (I think I’m #8) Ok, but which medieval embroidered lion are you today? (#8 for me again) As noted on the lion’s page on the Medieval Bestiary website, the lion was the king of the beasts and thus was usually the…
The new Smithsonian Associates program catalog lists a pair of webinars of interest to animal art history, each focused on a famous female natural history artist: The Irrepressible Rosa Bonheur: The 19th Century’s Most Famous Woman ArtistEvening Lecture/SeminarWednesday, November 16, 2022 – 6:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Maria Sibylla…
This fabulous frog racking up likes and retweets on Twitter can be found amongst the over 100 species of flora and 50 species of fauna in a huge scroll painting by Ito Jakuchu called “Saichufu” (also known in English as “Compendium of Vegetables and Insects”). Here is a detail of the…
I’ve been going through my photos from all my museum visits from the past few years, and came across these photos I took of a fun find from the Met. The Met’s catalog of the Robert Lehman Collection suggests that the painting was inspired in part by Matisse’s Bathers with…
The Walters Art Museum just announced a virtual event scheduled for Thursday 4 August from 6pm-7pm (Eastern U.S. time), tied into their current Majolica Mania exhibition, and specifically, its star attraction: The star of the Majolica Mania exhibition is a five-foot-tall ceramic peacock nicknamed Percy. This impressive sculpture celebrates the…
Horseshoe crabs have been swimming in earth’s oceans for a long time…their fossil record goes back at least 480 million years! This card illustrates the Atlantic Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus), one of four still-living species and the only one native to the Americas.(Also, their common name is misleading — they…
Coins of Aegina depicted images of sea turtles on their coins when the island of Aegina was the supreme sea power among the Greek city-states. The sea turtle, seen here on the front (obverse) of this coin, represented its naval strength and resiliency. After its defeat by Athens in 458…
