Who are your favourite natural history painters?

Ugo Mochi had an interesting art form indeed ! Especially because we tend towards seeing and seeking the fullest range of colours possible but Mochi instead chose to focus entirely on the shadows and silhouettes which is a really interesting and quite refreshing take on things really.

Another interesting artist, just checking Burian's work out and I love the scenes where he imagines the paleolithic / Ice age hunter gatherers hunting megafauna. Personally I am fascinated by these periods and one of my hobbies is visiting the remaining Magdalenian cave art sites of Europe open to the Public.

However, I often find that I come out of these visits and can't really envisage fully what these times must have looked like but Burian through his art really seems to captures these landscapes and worlds (and just the fact that humanity was another vulnerable animal living a precarious existance amongst much fiercer beasts) well.

 

I'm really glad you mentioned Bosch in this thread as I am actually a huge Bosch fan . Although he produced a lot of phantasmagorical and fantastical paintings I totally agree with you that he was actually a pretty talented natural history painter too and especially with regards to birds.

I lived for a brief time in Madrid, Spain, and often visited the Prado to see "The Garden of Earthly Delights". In the central panel you can see that he has painted beautiful images of European avifauna like kingfishers, goldfinches, mallard ducks, tawny owls and hoopoes (more too but those are the only that I can remember).

 

Work of him featured in a recent exposition here in the Netherlands about the changing views on illustrating dinosaurs and extinct animals (like the models of Waterhouse in Crystal Palace, Jurassic Park, etc), but I couldn't recall his name, but I wanted to mention "that Czech guy" after writing about Knight.

 

Not the first name that comes to my mind thinking about animal illustrations! "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is one of the most fascinating paintings to me.

 

In the Field Museum in Chicago, If I remembered correctly.

 

It's one of the highlights of the museum, IMO.

 

Yes, it certainly is an incredible masterpiece of art, if you haven't already you really should see it in the Prado one day, it is breathtaking. You could spend days looking at it and still find / discover new details.

See that is another museum that I want to see one day, not just for the murals but for dioramas too which I've heard are absolutely incredible.

 

There are many amazing artists. I like Charles Tunnicliffe and George Edward Lodge. I also love the work of my friend Alastair Proud. I have several of his paintings.

 

Beautiful paintings indeed Carl, especially the gulls flying over the waves and whales, really captures the movement of the waves and the light on the surface of the water well.

I like Tunnicliffe's black and white pencil sketches best as they really bring out the details of the plumage of the birds. Lodge's images of birds are also quite impressive, again I think the paintings of raptors within their habitats are the most evocative.

Your colleague Dominic Wormell is also a pretty good watercolour painter. Actually several of his paintings of callitrichids are proudly hanging on the wall at the IPÊ headquarters in Teodoro Sampaio, I was very impressed with them.

 

Yes, Dominic Wormell is very good and he is doing a painting for me of the Red-billed Choughs we released at Sorrel Point in Jersey. My late colleague William Oliver was an amazing artist and I have some of his work also.

 

I would add Luis V. Rey to the list, although I prefer his older work. I have a book with very colourfull and distinct illustrations of dinosaurs by him.

I have been to the Prado. The painting of Bosch was one of the highlights to me, although the two "1808" paintings of Goya impressed me the most.

 

He really has a talent with painting primates and fairly recently did a brilliant painting of our focal species the buffy tufted marmoset that was on the cover of a management PDF document.

Just looked up William Olivers artwork and it is indeed brilliant, it is amazing that he illustrated so many field guides and conservation related publications, clearly he loved the wildlife of South-East Asia and wanted others to do so too.

 

I love the work of Goya too (even if it is disturbing), these are also paintings that I used to spend time looking at when in the Prado, the black paintings are very haunting indeed.

 

One more to throw in; Ian Wallace who has a great feel for the jizz of birds; I own the original of his plate of Ruffs from Birds of the Western Palaearctic.

 

Do you have this plate framed ?

 

@Tetzoo Quizzer What about Edward Lear too ?

He was an incredible artist when it came to painting birds, I love his images of macaws in particular.

My favourites would be the Scarlet and the blue and gold macaw plates.

 

As a small child, I collected the picture cards given away in packets of Brook Bond tea; Tunnicliffe's excellent paintings provided the illustrations for the series:

Bird Portraits
British Wildlife
African Wildlife
Tropical Birds
Asian Wildlife

and these encouraged many children in the late 1950s / early 1960s to take an interest in animals.

 

Not yet; it is on a long list of things to do one day. Also, I have so many bookcases I don’t know where I would put it.

 

Sounds like it would look good on the wall one day though and especially considering your interest in birds.

I myself would like to put up some framed natural history prints too, but at the moment that is a bit impossible.