The Zoo in Art

The Speaker, 5 March 1892, pages 283-284, 1,568 words

Those who love the Zoo – and who does not? – may be advised to visit quickly Mr. J.T. Nettleship's exhibition of birds and beasts of prey at the Rembrandt Head Gallery in Vigo. The collection consists of seventy-six drawingH done in pastel. Each is a note of something seen in the Zoo, and the collection might be described by Mr. Nettleship as "Un voyage autour de mon jardin.'' True that there is neither a giraffe nor a zebra. A giraffe might form the subject for a bronze, but the ungainly and discordantly coloured creature could not be easily introduced into a picture. In art the giraffe and the zebra are as impossible as Swiss scenery. That the treatment is everything is an easy and flippant phrase, but it may be doubted if the greatest landscape painter that ever lived could make a picture out of the lake, the châlet, the pine forest, and the blue mountain with the white mountain just behind it. Nothing is impossible to genius, but, up to the present, genius has shrunk from the zebra and Switzerland. Monkeys only just lend themselves to artistic treatment, and Mr. Nettleship has wisely left out of his collection the shaggy coats of our ancestors. I am wrong; on referring to the catalogue I find there one moustached monkey. Lions and tigers are Mr. Nettleship's favourites, and among these I noticed "73, Tiger waking.'' The great power of the head and shoulders contrast excellently well with the long, delicate, sinuous line of the back. The foreshortening is correct, and the bright animal goes well with the slate-coloured background. With the sweet, strong forms of the feline this painter is ever in keen sympathy, but into this sketch he has conveyed harmonious colour and depth of tone. Many complimentary things might also be said about "02, Polar bears playing in the sea." The great white animals playing so cumbrously in the blue water are most impressive, and the mind imagines easily the lone shores where never a tree grows and the air is filled with the remorseless green glitter of the towering iceberg. 42 is likewise an excellent sketch of two leopards. The animals lie close up together in strangely natural attitudes. The artist has surprised them at a moment when they were really themselves, and his notation of the scene is effectual and trustworthy. "72, Beavers at sun-down," strikes the visitor as being more a picture than anything else in the room. There is air in this sketch, and its quiet grey tone is altogether charming.

The majority of visitors will, of course, think that the artist has done well in placing the animals on the banks of their native river instead of by the side of the makeshift little pool of their captivity. The majority of visitors will also excuse the artist for having transported many a lion and tiger from the narrow iron bars to the boundless solitudes they were taken from. It would be unreasonable, it would be ridiculous, to expect an artist not to transport the beavers from their filthy, unpoetical pool to the beautiful banks of their Canadian river, and the king of beasts in a fifteen-foot cage would be a cruel absurdity; none but the most inartistically ignorant would attempt to represent the magnificent animal in the mean monotony of a daily fifteen feet of prowl. So the general mind will think, and artists will aver that the bars are an artistic impossibility. Bars in front of the animal are, I adroit, an artistic impossibility, but why not bars behind the beast? What, cries the artist, with a view of those dreadful antelope-houses and the soldier and the maid-servant coming along the walk! 'Why not? cry I, why not? The ballet-girl with her stiff white skirt was an artistic impossibility until Degas took her in hand, and if he were to attempt the feline I am sure that it would be in a cage; he would eschew the tawny desert. The wild tawny beast feeding to satiety on antelopes is one thing, and the gaunt, constrained beast, pacing fifteen feet of cage, partially fed at eventide on a lump of horse-flesh thrown to him by his keeper, is another, Why confuse the two? Besides, are you quite sure that the wild animal is more artistic than the captive animal? Is there not a pathetic interest to be found in the yawning of those miserable captives behind their bars? See the lioness as she stretches herself with arched back, and by her side are the mass of tawny mane and the lank quarters of the lion as he lies looking through the eternal bars. The spring is beginning in the gardens, and the gaiety of the first foliage and the unexpected red of the soldier's jacket are strangely suggestive and in a. way beautiful; and only a heavy shadow or some violet-tinted mist is wanted to soften the patent vulgarity of the antelope houses, and bring them within the picture. The charm of mystery is, I know, essential in every picture, but the atmosphere gives this. Without atmosphere, realism is impossible; with atmosphere, the lowly and prosaic may be invested with sweetness and dignity.

There was a time when only the fortunes of kings and queens were deemed of interest, but as civilisation blots romance and adventure out of life the artist grows more and more disposed to seek his material among the poor in spirit, the meek, and the miserable. Kings and queens are artistically as extinct as the dodo. The loves of duchesses and their like have gone the way of giraffes, zebras and Swiss scenery, and the peasant, the vagrant, and even the servant-girl, are the subjects that inspire both pen and pencil. The continuous enfranchisement of the people is as notable in art as in politics, and to me it seems that art never took a more decisive step than when the Goncourts wrote "Germinie Lacerteux." For this surely was the first time that a writer undertook to enlist the serious sympathies of readers in the life of a low servant-girl, it was the first time that so humble a being appeared as the heroine of a novel. The fact is both important and significant, for it was the most decisive effort in long and continuous movement towards the abolition of the conventional picturesque; it was the opening up of a wider horizon, and the means of introducing into art all kinds of fresh possibilities. It was like the discovery of America. Painting followed literature, and Millet showed us that the lives of ignorant peasants were as interesting to us as elegant dames and courtiers had been to our eighteenth-century ancestors. Since then many a piece of the conventionally poetic has been pulled away, and the last that still clings is the desert, which we still continue to believe as essential in the pictorial representation of the lion. The lion must still prowl up and down ruined staircases in the moonlight or chase antelopes through an African wilderness. He may, it is true, devour a Christian martyr in an amphitheatre, but he may not yet stare vacuously through iron bars at a soldier and his "gal." The Zoo has not yet been admitted to be possible in art. In Mr. Nettleship's art, as in Mr. Briton Rivière's, antelopes bound over high grass, the wolves sleep under sunset skies, and the condor is blown about in a gale.

There is either too much or too little Zoo in the work of all our animal-painters – either the artist imagines the animal in its natural wilderness, correcting (or, should I say, stimulating?) his imagination with a few observations taken in the Zoo, or he accepts the Zoo and gives us the animals in their present environment. He may do either one or the other, but it seems to me to be utterly wrong to draw the caged animal exactly as it is and then rub in a bit of tawny desert. The animal-painter will say that it would be impossible to point out the difference between the lion in a cage and the lion in the desert. That is so, and yet there is a difference, and we feel it, although we may not be able to point it out. There is something false – evanescent and impalpable though the error may be – in the lion that has been transferred from the cage to the desert, something suspicious in the animal's gait and look that tells us that that is not the truth. Go to Mr. Nettleship's exhibition and see for yourself. Will anyone doubt, for instance, that "72, tiger waking" is a caged beast? Yet there is no visible sign of this in the drawing. That grey background might very well stand for the shadowy depth of a cavern. And would it be possible for anyone to mistake 42, a pair of leopards asleep, for animals in their natural state? These are the best drawings in the collection. Mr. Nettleship is at his best when he stands most strictly within the precincts of the Zoo. The difficulties of the crossbars he has not attempted to solve, leaving them for some future painter of wild animals, or, should I say, for some future painter of animals in captivity? G.M.