Fierce friends : artists and animals, 1750-1900 /

Based on an exhibition in 2005-06 at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) and the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), this catalog by Lippincott (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) and Bluhm (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum/Fondation Corboud, Cologne, Germany) is a delightful, insightful book on a topic generally excluded from the art history canon. Animal art today is confined mostly to natural history museums, not displayed in art galleries. Yet the works depicted were often heralded as masterpieces in their time. A carefully reasoned foreword by science writer Desmond Morris, who is also known for training a chimp to paint pictures, is followed by a superb 16-page essay on the changing attitudes toward the animal kingdom as depicted in visual media, primarily from the mid-18th to the early-20th centuries. The remaining 120 pages are color illustrations (often full page) with extensive commentaries (sometime full page too), rather than customary brief captions. The visual media range over painting, sculpture, photography, taxidermy, and book illustration. The specter of evolutionism and Darwin haunts the text, along with the rise of modern geology and paleontology. Other themes that emerge are the prevalence of the mechanical world view in science and technology, and the concomitant Industrial Revolution. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through faculty. D. Topper University of Winnipeg