A Paper Menagerie: Animals in Art

It's an eccentric wee show, and some of the choices are quite odd, but it serves as an enjoyable distraction nonetheless

Article by Ted Maul | 16 May 2006

This small exhibition offers us the chance to see a selection of prints, drawings and paintings united by the fact that each one depicts an animal of one kind or another. It's an eccentric wee show, and some of the choices are quite odd, but it serves as an enjoyable distraction nonetheless. There's a couple of nice Dürer prints here, including Adam and Eve; which is as notable for its geezer-in-a-wig rendering of Eve as it is for its multiplicity of beasts. Edwin John Alexander's watercolour of a peacock is a rather vivid and elegant rendering whilst Guercino's image of people hiding from a dragon will raise a smile. Crawhall's gouache of a white drake is simple yet very pleasing and John Macallan Swan's chalk drawing of a tiger is bold, supple, and conveys the imposing power of the animal very well. The most remarkable picture is Wenceslaus Hollar's seventeenth-century image of a swan and a stalk walking upright in fashionable period dress, which is both hilarious and deliciously surreal. [Ted Maul]

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh until May 28, free.