Anne Ronan

“Beauty and the Bestiary” investigates how American artists contended with the problems and exploited the possibilities of representing animals during the final decades of the nineteenth century. These years bore witness to the precipitous rise of not only Darwinism, but also the animal rights movement, affective modes of pet keeping, zoological parks, and modern conservationism. These developments fundamentally changed the ontological status of animals in the Anglo-American imagination, fueling fierce debate on and popular interest in the mental and emotional lives of nonhuman subjects. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pleasures and pitfalls of sympathetically relating to animals preoccupied artists and audiences alike. Since then, however, the advent of modernism has increasingly marginalized the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic questions aroused by interspecies encounters, making these issues appear far less significant to the history of art than they in fact were.

This dissertation focuses on four American painters—William Holbrook Beard, Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Astley D. M. Cooper—considered in relation to the wider visual culture of animals at this time. Their work charted the shifting boundary between the human and the nonhuman, thoughtfully interrogating the personal and political meaning of our relations, both lived and imagined, with other species. Revisiting and reconsidering these unruly visions is imperative, not only to nuance our understanding of American art, but to fully grasp how its legacy has profoundly shaped our present-day commitments to the natural world.