Advertising an Exhibition: Oudry's Amazingly Life-Like Animals
As the ad agency for The Getty we always have great material to work with, so it wasn't hard to bring Oudry's Painted Menagerie to life. The challenge, however, was to cut through the clutter of traditional advertising....
Clara In the Eyes of a Zookeeper
The details in Oudry's painting of the rhino Clara—the armor-like skin on the back, the little bumps—are superb. When I look at this, I see an Indian rhino. But I see a captive Indian rhino....
Eye of the Beholder
The current issue of Zoo View, the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens' membership magazine, includes an article by Paul Gachot about the history of animals in art. After I read this article, I found myself thinking again about Oudry's animal portraits and pondering why we humans make images of animals....
Today's Rhinos: Comparing Clara's Life to Contemporary Rhinos, a Rhino Expert's Perspective, Part 2
A lot has changed since Clara went on the show circuit in Europe , inspiring Oudry to capture her essence—and perhaps the essence of the time—on canvas. In the mid-18th century, Clara’s life would hardly resemble the life of the rhinos in our 100-acre enclosures at San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park
Today's Rhinos: Comparing Clara's Life to Contemporary Rhinos, a Rhino Expert's Perspective, Part 1
I viewed the Getty’s online exhibit of Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s rhinoceros paintings with keen interest, as I am a veteran researcher of rhinos in both captivity and the wild...
Audio: Elizabeth Morrison's Lecture on Fantastic Beasts
Audio is now available of a recent lecture by Elizabeth Morrison, curator of the exhibition Medieval Beasts, on the fantastic beasts found in manuscripts. In Europe of the Middle Ages, most people never ventured further than the countryside around their own towns. Their only knowledge of the lands beyond Europe came from books...
Clara the Rhinoceros, Before and After
At the end of the exhibition Oudry's Painted Menagerie, you'll find an illustrated time line of the five-year painting conservation project that brought Clara the rhino back to life, restoring the tattered, faded canvas as nearly as possible to its pristine, original condition. That time line was created as part of a collaboration between the education department and paintings conservator Mark Leonard...
