May 23rd is World Turtle Day! This tortoise painting was an interesting find in the British portraiture rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Even the signage acknowledges how unusual it is!
January 31st is International Zebra Day! First up, images of the first known zebras imported into Great Britain.
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…
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…
The vivid feathers were expensive, with the most prized specimens imported from Cambodia and Vietnam. Artisans cut them to shape before painstakingly pasting the feathers onto gilded metal backing that formed the structure of the headdresses. Precious and semiprecious stones such as rubies, agate, and jadeite as well as other…
