The Roland Collection

Along with the human form, animals were subjects of the earliest art ever created. For prehistoric artists, beasts represented food but were also sacred, spiritual beings. Animals remained a vital component of all art in all cultures. With the Renaissance, the depiction of animals themselves (important in much classical and medieval art) was neglected in favor of supposedly more elevated subjects, yet re-emerged in the eighteenth century with artists such as Stubbs, with his animal 'portraits,' and became part of the Romantic vocabulary with artists such as Géricault and Delacroix. The representation of animals also played an important (and often overlooked) rôle in the development of Modernism, which often sought subjects far away from the anecdotal or heroic allegories of academicism.