Animal painting
A genre of art whose principal subject is the animal; more broadly, animalistics is any depiction of animals in art.
The animal genre is a genre of painting, sculpture, graphic and decorative art devoted to the depiction of animals. Ukrainian encyclopaedias also use the broader word animalistyka: the depiction of animals, birds and other living creatures in secular fine and applied art and on ritual objects.
The two scopes should be kept apart. Animals have been depicted since the Upper Palaeolithic, and in European art they are constantly present in mythological, battle, everyday, landscape and portrait works as a symbol, an attribute or a detail. The genre proper comprises works in which the animal is the principal subject. As a genre, animal painting took shape in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century; according to the Getty thesaurus, the painting of animals — dogs, horses, livestock, exotic beasts — was highly developed in eighteenth-century European painting. A separate phenomenon is the Animaliers: French sculptors of the mid-nineteenth century who produced realistic small-scale sculpture of domestic and wild animals.
On the territory of Ukraine the earliest images of animals are associated with the Mizyn site and Kamiana Mohyla; the “animal style” of Scythian art is well known (the pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla). Animal motifs dominate folk art — toys, ceramics, stove tiles, decorative painting. In the twentieth century Maria Prymachenko created a world of fantastic beasts and birds (Bears at the Apiary, 1965), while the graphic artist Jacques Hnizdovsky treated animal subjects laconically in the graphic works Eagle (1968) and Peacock (1980).
