Dinosaur Artists

There were many artists in the past who specialized in animals, wildlife or even specifically, prehistoric life. The names we most often hear associated with prehistoric art are Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Charles R. Night, Zdeněk Burian, and Rudolph Zallinger.

In England, in 1852, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was asked to create life-size sculptures of prehistoric animals to be put on display in the Crystal Palace Park. With the help of some of the leading scientists of the time, spent three years creating the concrete sculptures.

Later he was asked to created a similar display for Central Park in New York, but the project was cancelled midway. They say the models that he had created up to that point are buried on the grounds where the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park are today. After this, he went on to do dinosaur reconstructions in several American museums before returning to England in 1878. (Wikipedia)

One of the most famous and influential dinosaur artists was Charles R. Night. He has been the hero artists as divers as stop motion animators Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen to modern day dinosaur artists and sculptors. As a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s, almost every dinosaur book I marveled at seemed to have some Knight paintings in them. His famous painting from 1896 of what was then called Laelaps (now called Dryptosaurus) was much ahead of its time. It showed one animal leaping onto the other. Whether in play or in battle, it showed that dinosaurs didn't have to be depicted as slow moving hulking beasts. These were as lively as large predatory cats of today.

This and other paintings of prehistoric animals, mammals as well as dinosaurs, led to his being asked to paint a huge mural for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. He also painted a series of murals for the Chicago Field Museum. Here he produced what was probably his most famous painting depicting a Tyrannosaurus rex confronting a Triceratops. This painting forever cemented in the publics mind, a battle that of two titans that was depicted by many artist and in many variations for years to come. These works led to other mural work in the Carnegie Museum, the Smithsonian Institute and the Peabody Museum of Natural History. (Wikipedia)

One artist who was particularly influenced by Knight was Zdeněk Burian. His early works were very similar in style to Knights but his own style became more detailed in his "account" of a particular scene. He spent much time making the landscapes and surroundings in his paintings as the main subject. They have a feel as if they were painted from nature. Not so stylized or posed as as if they were a snapshot of nature. Being of Czech decent, many of his original paintings now hang in the Natural History Museum in Prague. (Wikipedia)

Rudolph Zallinger seemed to take the realism aspect of dinosaur paintings one step further. His Age of Reptiles mural for the Peabody Museum of Natural History was extremely detailed and life-like. (More information about it's construction can be found here: http://www.peabody.yale.edu/explore/makingmural.html) It was featured in Life magazine in the early 50s and has been sited by more than one paleo artist and paleontologist as the catalyst for getting them interested in dinosaurs.

Modern Dinosaur Artists