#animals

He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.

This one was reportedly once catalogued as a copy of a lost original; now the thinking is it's based on one of his drawings instead — the credit's still murky.

This wasn't made to hang on a wall at all, apparently — it's a full-size design for a tapestry, painted so the king's weavers had something to copy. The set it belonged to went into a palace dining room. Cheerful stuff to eat your lunch under, I suppose.

He never left France — this jungle came from botanical gardens and picture books, not anywhere he'd actually set foot.

This print was meant for an illustrated Bible — Marc was working through the Genesis story with animals standing in for it. The other one in the set showed horses; museum notes call this one the more menacing of the two.

He moved to Paris partly to get away from how Black artists got treated back home, and this moody, almost colorless lighting became the thing he was known for there.

Supposedly he once said he didn't paint animals, he painted light — which is a funny thing to claim when, from what I can tell, his whole career was ducks and cows beside ditches.

Tthe model was apparently his own dog — a big white shepherd — and some say it's the same dog painted twice. A couple of years later he was the man doing blue horses and yellow cows; this is just before all that started.

Nobody's sure why this canvas is named after a rabbit — the creature reads more like a stylised fish leaping through the foliage, and both readings have defenders.