The Development And History Of Wildlife Art History.

Wildlife art, which is art on the subject of wild animals and birds, is a very popular area of the arts today. Some of the very earliest works of art were on this particular subject.

Cave paintings from the prehistoric age often showed wild animals and birds which were important as either food or danger at the time and so conceptualized in a very different way from how we current see them. Sculptures from the ancient world are also often found to include animals and birds.

The evolution of people’s attitudes to wild animals and birds is clearly reflected in the wildlife art created through the ages. After initially living lives close to wild animals humans later grew to consider themselves separate from the natural world. This change of perspective is reflected in the fact that wildlife was almost entirely absent from long periods of western art. Religious views at these times ignored the natural world and focused entirely on the human realm as being the only realm worth considering.

The Romantic era of art used wildlife in its emotional representations of the world. A typical example is that of a proud noble lion contrasted with an evil-looking tiger with its eyes downcast in shame. The boundaries between the human world and the natural world were often represented in the art of these times. An example is paintings of a wild lion attacking a domestic horse.

Wildlife art has become a more popular subject recently and is greatly loved today. Landseer’s stag paintings were among the most popular of any artwork in the Victorian era and are still very popular today. Audubon’s bird books were rightly considered to be the finest picture books ever published.

Conservation of nature is currently a trendy topic and for this reason many wildlife paintings are created specifically to increase public awareness of important issues of the conservation of nature. Nature is also of great interest to many people as a subject in its own right, and current wildlife art reflects this interest by showing wild animals and birds in their natural habitat.

If you would like to see any of the paintings referred to above, and find out more about Wildlife Art? then visit Thomas Goldman’s great site, the definitive guide to wildife art, with a great many beautiful examples (most available for sale as posters).