11/6/2023 0 Comments Pet painterAccording to the Telegraph, he once told a concerned fellow diner at a Manhattan restaurant that Babou was just an ordinary house cat he’d “painted over in an op art design.” It’s not clear what Babou’s ultimate fate was, although the wild animal didn’t seem thrilled to be kept on a leash. While Dalí was seen with exotic animals like an anteater in Paris in 1969 as sort of performance art stunts, Babou was actually a pet, traveling with him to dinner engagements and on a luxury ocean liner. Salvador Dalí and his ocelot Babou (1965) (photo by Roger Higgins, via Library of Congress/Wikimedia)Īnother exotic cat to be claimed by an artist was Salvador Dalí’s ocelot Babou. Top got the biggest send-off, with Rossetti drafting a eulogy (shown at the top of this post), with the artist bent over in tears before the prone wombat, a Victorian tomb in the background, and these words below:Īnd tail-less he was sure to die! Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy’s Lion There are reports that he got a second wombat, and an 1871 portrait by William Bell Scott may show Rossetti with a new wombat on his lap (or, as some have speculated, a woodchuck). Rossetti had the body taxidermied for display in his home. London is no place for a wombat, and at the age of two, Top died of illness. Morris” with the wombat from 1869 above, both decked out in haloes.) He got his wombat in 1869, calling it Top - a not so coy dig at his mistress Jane Morris’s hapless husband who was nicknamed Topsy. Thanks to Charles Jamrach who was supplying exotic pets to the elite of Victorian London, Rossetti owned at various times a kangaroo, owl, armadillo, llama, and toucan. Kate Horowitz at Mental Floss wrote an excellent article on the star-crossed romance of Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a wombat. Exhuming his wife from her grave in order to retrieve some poems is not the most curious anecdote about Rossetti, as he was absolutely obsessed with the Australian marsupial to the point of calling the wombat “a joy, a delight, a madness.” He often convened his friends at the Regent’s Park Zoo wombat exhibition, which he called the “Wombat’s Lair,” yet he wanted a furry companion of his own. Morris and a wombat (1869), pen and brown ink over graphite on paper (via British Museum/Wikimedia) Here are a few more stories of art, pets, and misfortune.ĭante Gabriel Rossetti’s drawing of Mrs. There’s a whole history of woe for the pets of famous artists, especially when the creative types decided no ordinary cat or dog would do, and brought exotic creatures into their urban lives, or chose a rather macabre tribute to their animal lives. We recently shared the sad tale of a cat that fell in a tub of goldfish in 1747, drowned, and was extolled in poems and paintings. Other pets are not so lucky, and not just Orville, the cat turned into a helicopter by Bart Jansen (although who knows what cats desire for their afterlives), or the cat of artist Tinkebell, made into a purse (to be fair, not just for spectacle, but a comment on the ease with which we use other animals for leather). Some artists glorify their furry studio assistants, like cat-lover Paul Klee immortalizing feline faces in his modernist shapes, or David Hockney and his whole painting oeuvre devoted to his dachshunds. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrated poem mourning his pet wombat (November 6, 1869), pen on paper (via British Museum/Wikimedia)
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