Charles Robert Knight (October 21, 1874 in
Brooklyn – April 15, 1953 in
Manhattan) was an
American artist best known for his influential
paintings of
dinosaurs and other
prehistoric animals. His works have been reproduced in many books and are currently on display at several major
museums in the United States.
Biography
Early life
As a child, Knight was deeply interested in nature and animals, and
spent many hours copying the illustrations from his father’s
natural history books. Though
legally blind because of
astigmatism
and a subsequent injury to his right eye, Knight pursued his artistic
talents with the help of specially-designed glasses, and at the age of
twelve, he enrolled at the
Metropolitan Art School to become a
commercial artist. In 1890, he was hired by a church-decorating firm to design
stained-glass windows, and after two years with them, became a
freelance illustrator for books and
magazines, specializing in nature scenes.
Entelodon (then known as
Elotherium), the first commissioned restoration of an extinct animal by Charles R. Knight
[1]
In his free time, Knight visited the
American Museum of Natural History, attracting the attention of Dr. Jacob Wortman, who asked Knight to paint a restoration of a prehistoric
pig,
Elotherium, whose
fossilized bones were on display. Knight applied his knowledge of modern pig
anatomy,
and used his imagination to fill in any gaps. Wortman was thrilled with
the final result, and the museum soon commissioned Knight to produce an
entire series of
watercolors
to grace their fossil halls. His paintings were hugely popular among
visitors, and Knight continued to work with the museum well until the
1930s, painting what would become some of the world’s most celebrated
images of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and prehistoric humans.
Leaping Laelaps by Charles R. Knight, 1897
One of Knight's best-known pieces for the American Museum of Natural History is 1897’s
Leaping Laelaps, which was one of the few pre-1960s images to present dinosaurs as active, fast-moving creatures (thus anticipating the "
Dinosaur Renaissance" theories of modern
paleontologists like
Robert Bakker). Other familiar American Museum paintings include Knight’s portrayals of
Agathaumas,
Allosaurus,
Brontosaurus,
Smilodon, and the
Woolly Mammoth. All of these have been reproduced in numerous places and have inspired many imitations.
Knight’s work for the museum was not without critics, however: many
curators argued that his work was more artistic than scientific, and
protested that he did not have sufficient scientific expertise to render
prehistoric animals as precisely as he did. While Knight himself agreed
with that his murals for the Hall of the Age of Man were “primarily a
work of art,” he insisted that he had as much paleontological knowledge
as the museum’s own curators.
[2]
Nationwide attention
After Knight established a reputation at the American Museum of
Natural History, other natural history museums began requesting
paintings for their own fossil exhibits. In 1925, for example, Knight
produced an elaborate mural for the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County which portrayed some of the
birds and
mammals whose remains had been found in the nearby
La Brea Tar Pits. The following year, Knight began a 28-
mural series for
Chicago’s
Field Museum of Natural History,
a project which chronicled the history of life on earth and took four
years to complete. At the Field Museum, he produced one of his
best-known pieces, a mural featuring
Tyrannosaurus and
Triceratops. This confrontation scene between a
predator and its
prey
would inspire a huge number of imitations, establishing the two
dinosaurs as “mortal enemies” in the popular consciousness. The Field
Museum’s Alexander Sherman says, “It is so well-loved that it has become
the standard encounter for portraying the age of dinosaurs”.
[3]
Knight’s work also found its way to the
Carnegie Museums in
Pittsburgh the
Smithsonian Institution, and Yale's
Peabody Museum of Natural History, among others. Several
zoos, such as the
Bronx Zoo, the
Lincoln Park Zoo, and the
Brookfield Zoo,
also approached Knight to paint murals of their living animals, and
Knight enthusiastically complied. Knight was actually the only person in
America allowed to paint
Su Lin, a
giant panda that lived at Brookfield Zoo during the 1930s.
[4]
While making murals for museums and zoos, Knight continued
illustrating books and magazines, and became a frequent contributor to
National Geographic. He also wrote and illustrated several books of his own, such as
Before the Dawn of History (Knight, 1935),
Life Through the Ages (1946),
Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists (1947), and
Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventure (1949). Additionally, Knight became a popular
lecturer, describing prehistoric life to audiences across the country.
Eventually, Knight began to retire from the public sphere to spend
more time with his grandchildren, who shared his passion for animals and
prehistoric life. In 1951, he painted his last work, a mural for the
Everhart Museum in
Scranton, Pennsylvania. Two years later, he died peacefully in Manhattan.
Legacy
Brontosaurus by Charles R. Knight, 1897
Knight has been hailed as "one of the great popularizers of the
prehistoric past", and as having influenced generations of museum-goers.
[5]
Examples of Knight's work frequently appeared in dinosaur books
published in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.
[6] Many works released since then also include examples of Knight’s paintings; for example,
Stephen Jay Gould used one of Knight’s paintings for the cover of his 1991 book
Bully for Brontosaurus and another in his 1996 book
Dinosaur in a Haystack. Though many other paleoartists have succeeded Knight (most notably
Zdeněk Burian) Knight’s paintings still remain very popular among paleontology enthusiasts. A commemorative edition of Knight’s 1946 book
Life Through the Ages [
ISBN 0-253-33928-6] was recently published by
Indiana University Press, and a 2007
calendar [
ISBN 0-7649-3622-0] of Knight’s paintings is also currently available. Additionally, fantasy artist
William Stout has compiled a series of
Charles Knight Sketchbooks, which contain many rare and previously unpublished drawings and
studies by Knight.
Knight's restoration of
Agathaumas from 1897, which was later used as basis for a model
Agathaumas used in the 1925 film
The Lost World.
[7]
Because Knight worked in an era when new and often fragmentary
fossils were coming out of the American west in quantity, not all of his
creations were based on solid evidence; dinosaurs such as his
improbably-adorned
Agathaumas (1897: left) for example, were somewhat speculative. His depictions of better-known
ceratopsians
as solitary animals inhabiting lush grassy landscapes were largely
imaginative (the grasslands that feature in many of his paintings didn't
appear until the
Cenozoic).
Although Knight sometimes made musculoskeletal studies of living
animals, he did not do so for his dinosaur restorations, and he restored
many dinosaurs with typical reptilian-like limbs and narrow hips (Paul,
1996). In the 1920s, studies by the celebrated palaeontologists
Alfred Romer and
Gerhard Heilmann
(Heilmann, 1926) had confirmed that dinosaurs had broad avian-like hips
rather than those of a typical reptile. Knight often restored extinct
mammals, birds and marine reptiles in very dynamic action poses, but his
depictions of large dinosaurs as ponderous swamp-dwellers destined for
extinction reflected more traditional concepts (Paul, 1996). In his
catalogue to
Life through the Ages (1946), he reiterated views
that he had written earlier (Knight, 1935), describing the great beasts
as "slow-moving dunces" that were "unadaptable and unprogressive" while
conceding that small dinosaurs had been more active.
Cro-Magnon artists painting in Font-de-Gaume, 1920
The late
Stephen Jay Gould was one of Knight’s most well-known fans, notably refusing to refer to
Brontosaurus as “
Apatosaurus” because Knight had always referred to the creature with the former name.
[4] Gould writes in his 1989 book
Wonderful Life,
“Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley
of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction
of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most
celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the
canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to
this day”.
[8] Other admirers have included
special effects artist
Ray Harryhausen, who writes in his autobiography
An Animated Life, “Long before Obie (
Willis O'Brien), myself, and
Steven Spielberg,
he put flesh on creatures that no human had ever seen. […] At the L.A.
County Museum I vividly remember a beautiful Knight mural on one of the
walls depicting the way the tar pits would have looked in ancient times.
This, plus a picture book about Knight’s work my mother gave me, were
my first encounters with a man who was to prove an enormous help when
the time came for me to make three-dimensional models of these extinct
beings”.
[8] Paleoartist
Gregory S. Paul has also mentioned Knight as a big influence on him.
[9][10]
In 2012 a book about Knight and his art written by
Richard Milner titled
Charles R. Knight The Artist Who Saw Through Time was published.
[11]
An homage to the painter was also made in the
IMAX feature film,
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, in which he was portrayed by actor
Tuck Milligan.
Works
Tiger holding Hunters at bay, 1917
Knight’s works are currently included as part of the permanent collections of these colleges, libraries, museums, and zoos:
- Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
- American Museum of Natural History (New York, New York)
- Bethune-Cookman College (Daytona Beach, Florida)
- Bronx Zoo (Bronx, New York)
- Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
- The Dinosaur Museum (Blanding, Utah)
- Everhart Museum (Scranton, Pennsylvania)
- Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Illinois)
- Florida Museum of Natural History (Gainesville, Florida)
- Illinois State Museum (Springfield, Illinois)
- Mesa Southwest Museum (Mesa, Arizona)
- Museum of the Earth (Ithaca, New York)
- National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC)
- National Zoo (Washington, DC)
- Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (Los Angeles, California)
- Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)
- Science Museum of Minnesota (Saint Paul, Minnesota)
- Sebring Public Library (Sebring, Florida)
- Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, Connecticut)
In addition, a touring exhibit, Honoring the Life of Charles R.
Knight, was launched in 2003 and has visited several locations
throughout the United States.
Publications
- Before the Dawn of History, 1935
- Life Through the Ages, 1946
- Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists, 1947
- Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventure, 1949
- Charles R. Knight, Autobiography of an Artist, 2005
See also
- Wildlife art
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