apparently some illustrators do all their work from natural history collections. The other is the humanizing of the animal character. This quality is doubtless the logical outcome of animal folk-lore, which attributes human sentiments to wild creatures. If we are zealous for good art, we must look out for these faults when making our selections.
In the childhood of the race, as in the childhood of the individual, animals were the favorite art subject, as we see in the ancient sculpture of various peoples. Centuries before the age of painting, the figure decorations of temples and palaces consisted largely of lions and horses. Critics still visit the British museum to marvel at the lion hunt so realistically depicted on an Assyrian bas-relief, and the noble cavalcade of horses forming the frieze of the Parthenon. The best modern animal painters have something to learn from these. The painters of the early Christian centuries had very little idea of animal art. As their subjects were chiefly religious, animals were mere accessories to them, represented with childlike crudeness. In the old Nativity scenes the ox and the ass, standing (or kneeling) beside the manger, look like the wooden toys of a Noah’s ark, and the horses in the procession of the Magi, or in the Crucifixion scenes, are stiff wooden models covered with gorgeous trappings. Only once in a while some painter with a keener eye for street scenes would catch a child with a pet dog and smuggle him into the corner of his picture. You find such a group in a great fresco by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel, and another in Titian’s
