The animal has always been inextricably linked with man. From time immemorial, meat was eaten, clothes were made from skins. Evolution gradually opened and expanded forms of contact with animals: a tamed beast became a real partner: dogs guarded herds and housing, horses became an object of movement, cows and goats gave milk. The list, as you know, is incredibly long.
Animals, living next to a person, became involuntarily the object of observation embodied in the drawings. Animal painting originated in the ancient world. Everyone heard about the drawings on the rocks. Sphinxes personified the unity of the animal and human world, the bull symbolized strength, the cat symbolized grace and natural wisdom. The animal gradually became a means of spiritual development of people, the embodiment of beauty, perfection. So the animal genre appeared.
The amazing beauty of the living world is sung by a galaxy of animal artists. The world famous Vatagin, for example, literally humanized animals, reflecting arrogance, significance, severity, longing, sadness. The analogy between an animal and a human being made it possible to make the image of an animal more understandable, more capacious, and to understand behavior and actions.
The animalistic genre is not only a part of the visual arts, but also a part of the literature. Indeed, when animals are mentioned in literature (fairy tales, essays, short stories, feuilletons, fables), we ourselves unwittingly try on them a human image, human features, either exalting and glorifying, or exposed.
The great master Vasily Vatagin not only painted animals, but also carved images on stone, cut them out of wood. “A person takes a lot from an animal, gets a lot from him, but rarely realizes that an animal is not only power, not just meat. In our hands is a living creature, often dutifully suffering violence, suffering and at the same time understanding good, responding in the same way: deep affection, love, devotion, "he said.
Other famous animal painters expressed the same attitude in their paintings: I. Yuanji (Chinese artist, 11th century); Frans Sneijders, Jan Wildens, Jan Feith (Flemish painters of the XV-XVI centuries), Paulus Potter (Holland, XVI century), Mori Sosen (Japan, XVII century), Agasset (Swiss painter, XVIII century), Frenchman Eugene Delacroix (XVIII c) Russian sculptor Pyotr Klodt, French painter Philippe Rousseau, Brighton Riviere (English painter), German sculptor August Gaul, Russian sculptors and painters Vatagin, Groot, Sverchkov, Lansere and others.
Today, one of the most striking animal artists is perhaps the Canadian Robert Bateman, who was carried away by the genre as early as 12 years old. For several years he had experienced both the fascination with impressionism, and the interest in post-impressionism "a la Van Gogh", and the period of Cubism, and impressionist abstraction. But all stages were permeated by nature. Being a naturalist in essence, the artist sought to display nature with the greatest possible accuracy. At the age of thirty, Robert Bateman was imbued with paintings by Andrew Wyeth, a realist artist. It was then that the emancipation and vision of the individual path in art came to Bateman, to which he is faithful even now. The animal world, reflected in the paintings of Bateman, is diverse indefinitely. This is not a vacation, not a way to make money. This is a titanic work, saturated with love and an inexhaustible source of new ideas. The animal genre has become a lifestyle for Robert Bateman. His paintings do not leave anyone indifferent.
The animalistic genre is not just a reflection of the animal world, not just paintings that absorbed the love of the artists who wrote them, it is also an occasion and a call to think once again about involvement in the displayed world, about the incredibly close relationship with it, about how fragile it is, this the world and how we depend on us ...