'He allowed lion and a tiger to prowl around the castle and, if an unfortunate servant was mauled, they were paid compensation': Exotic animals in art

Today, it often seems there is nothing new under the sun, yet there was a time when the world was a place of wonders and every vessel that sailed from a European port could return with something miraculous never before seen on these shores. In 1520, Albrecht Dürer was in Brussels, now Belgium, when the cargo of a treasure ship newly returned from the Americas was put on display as part of the celebrations surrounding the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Among the gold and mosaic work, the startled onlookers were confronted by intricately wrought feathered shields in jewel colours and jaguar pelts. Dürer, the son of a goldsmith, was stupefied. ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,’ he wrote, ‘for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art.’

If most of these were objects fashioned by human hands, even more remarkable were the unknown birds and animals, whose plumage and pelts went into some of the treasures. What sort of creatures could these be? Small wonder, then, that Dürer was fascinated by the report of an Indian rhinoceros, named Ganda, arriving in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1515, the first in Europe since Roman times. The artist never saw the animal himself, but made a celebrated woodcut of it based on a written description and a sketch. As a result, his rhino looks as if it is armour-plated, its body covered with scales and patterned whorls and with other random lumps and excrescences — but this, after all, was a creature that almost defied imagination.

Indeed, Ganda’s story is almost one of (unhappy-ending) fable: he arrived as a diplomatic gift from Gujarat, survived a staged ‘fight’ with an elephant in a Lisbon park (the latter fled when Ganda approached) and was then dispatched by Manuel I as a gift to Pope Leo X in Rome, Italy, wearing a collar of green velvet decorated with flowers. However, the ship transporting him was wrecked in a storm near La Spezia, on the Italian coast, and Ganda drowned. His carcass was later recovered and his hide returned to Lisbon.

In the 1740s, another Indian rhino had better luck. Clara was adopted as an orphan at one month old and brought first to Rotterdam, then taken on a tour of Europe that lasted 17 years, meandering from Versailles and Zurich to Rome and Warsaw. Wherever she went, she caused a sensation — and gripped artists’ imaginations. In Dresden, she was sculpted by the great porcelain modeller Johann Joachim Kändler for Augustus the Strong’s menagerie of ceramic animals; in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Oudry made a life-size painting of her (her celebrity also led to a fad for wigs à la rhinocéros); and in Venice she was painted in her stall — dung and all — by Pietro Longhi, with her keeper brandishing her horn, which she had rubbed off. Clara ended her days in London in 1758, where she was exhibited in Lambeth, dying aged 20.

Some 30 years later, one more rhino arrived on these shores and was sold into a travelling menagerie to be taken around the country for the wonderment of English audiences. During the course of its tour, the poor animal was given sweet wine to drink, for the amusement of onlookers, and became too partial to it, knocking back four bottles at a time. In 1793, perhaps under the influence, it took a fall, dislocating a leg, which led to an infection and death. Before its unhappy demise, however, it was painted by George Stubbs, with a dreamy look on its face and eyeing the horizon — perhaps, suggests the artist, remembering the country where it was born.

Stubbs was no stranger to exotic animals. During the course of his career, he painted strange fauna arriving from Britain’s overseas dominions, including a zebra, a nilgai (a large Indian antelope), a kangaroo and a dingo, a giraffe, a tiger and a Canadian moose. In about 1765, he painted Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians: the picture shows the cat — the first of its kind ever seen in Britain, given by George III to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland — with its two Indian attendants. The Duke was eager to see how cheetahs hunted, so he had it put in an enclosure in Windsor Great Park with a stag. According to the St James’s Chronicle, the cheetah attacked twice and was beaten off and on the third attempt ‘the Stag threw him a considerable distance, and then followed him, on which the Tiger [cheetah] turned Tail’. The two Indians later found it in the woods eating a fallow deer, oblivious of its ignominy. The stag, meanwhile, was rewarded with a silver collar. Stubbs, entirely reasonably, ignored the bathos of the episode and painted the moment the cheetah’s hood was removed so it could see its prey, although the landscape is based on Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, rather than Windsor.

Big cats had long fascinated artists: in 1621, for example, Rubens painted four dramatic hunting pictures for Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, showing a lion and tiger hunt (with a leopard thrown in for good measure), as well as a wolf and crocodile hunt. A few decades later, in the 1650s, Rembrandt made several ink drawings of the recumbent lions he saw in a Dutch menagerie.

However, the artist who best captured the ferocity of the creatures was the 19th-century French animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. He specialised in small bronzes of panthers and lions with rippling musculature, bringing savage nature into the genteel salons of Paris. He also made larger public works — among them a Tiger Devouring a Gavial and A Lion Crushing a Serpent, this last sculpture standing in a public square in Philadelphia, USA, where passers-by have burnished the lion’s fangs to a sheen with their touch. Such was the animalier’s skill that, in 1850, the critic Théophile Gautier, noting how ‘Barye aggrandises his animal subjects, simplifying them, idealising and stylising them in a manner that is bold, energetic, and rugged’, called him ‘the Michelangelo of the menagerie’.

Big cats were objects of fascination in their native lands, too. Tipu’s Tiger, the famous automaton made in about 1795 for Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Indian kingdom of Mysore, shows a specimen devouring a European soldier — a keyboard hidden inside the beast emits the wailing of the man and the grunts of the big cat. The grisly object was a symbol of Indian resistance to colonisers. Further east in China, the image of a tiger was used to symbolise bravery, as well as being a defensive talisman. These predators long featured on robes, ceramics and metalwork, as well as in paintings, and some regiments of the Qing army even wore tiger outfits and hoods made from painted cotton.

In novelty-hungry Europe, of course, the creatures of the air were no less intriguing for artists. In about 1622, the Flemish painter Roelandt Savery expressed his sense of amazement at nature’s fecundity in his Landscape with Birds. Here, in an imagined craggy landscape inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a flock has gathered. More than 20 species are represented and they have flown in from all over the world. There are the familiar — swans, ducks and chickens — and the exotic. Ostriches from Africa stand above a cassowary from New Guinea, parrots from South America preen next to crowned cranes from sub-Saharan Africa, pelicans swim next to spoonbills and there, about to take a drink, is a dodo all the way from Mauritius.

The accuracy of Savery’s depiction meant that he must have seen these birds from life, almost certainly in the aviary of his patron Rudolf II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. He had the most celebrated Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of the age at Prague Castle and wanted every wunder of the natural world under his sway, too, so he commissioned elaborate gardens and a menagerie. He went so far as to allow a lion and a tiger to prowl around the castle and, if an unfortunate servant was mauled when going about their duties, they were paid compensation — if they didn’t survive the encounter, their families received the money instead.

It was, however, naturalist-artists of succeeding generations who did most to introduce nature’s bizarreries to European audiences. In 1699, for example, the dauntless German entomologist Maria Sybylla Merian visited Suriname with only her daughter for ‘protection’. On her return, laden with bug samples and sketches, she noted that: ‘All the people there were amazed that I came out of it alive, for most people there die of the heat.’ In 1705, she published the results of the trip as Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, a luxury volume in which she didn’t draw her flora and fauna as if pinned to the page, but composed them into vivid tableaux of nature in the raw — a caiman eating a snake, a spider devouring a hummingbird, soldier and leaf-cutter ants on the march.

As John James Audubon was also to show with the 435 large-scale illustrations in his monumental Birds of America, published in Britain (not America) between 1827 and 1838, there was no need to dream up fantastical creatures. Nature had already done just that.

This feature originally appeared in the February 11 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'