January 29, 2025

Menagerie: Animals in Art from the Wellin Museum has completed just over half of its run, and repeat visitors may note some subtle changes to the artwork on display for the spring semester. Walter Williams’s Caged Bird has taken the place of Fighting Cock #3, while our upcoming visiting artist Craig Zammiello’s Hercules beetle has replaced Goliath. We have a new selection of Thomas Nast’s cartoons, featuring a motley crew of symbolic and satirical lions, elephants, unicorns, and pigs. But perhaps most excitingly, we have refreshed our display of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s zoo sketches.

Keenly interested in animals and nature from an early age, Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) was not formally trained and honed his skills through direct observation. According to a friend, “in his spare moments he was everlastingly, pencil or pen in hand, sketching some little incident that appealed to him.” When the young French artist was given tickets to London Zoo in Regent’s Park, he began spending his weekends making rapid sketches of the zoo animals, often capturing the essence of their forms and movement with just a few lines. Some of the drawings included in Menagerie clearly represent an identifiable creature—for example, the lively, cartoonish lion with his shock of mane, and the delightfully plump and animated birds—while others are more abstract. Gaudier-Brzeska also made sketches of creatures that he encountered in his everyday life, for example a horse and rider, cat, and duck. Significantly, Gaudier-Brzeska’s rapid drawings inspired his increasingly experimental approach to sculpture from 1912 onward. He abandoned making preparatory models for his sculptures and began carving directly into the marble, achieving a vivacity and spontaneity similar to his zoo drawings, which seem to have been executed with a lightning-quick touch of pencil to paper—just enough to preserve the spirit of the creature depicted. Alongside his drawings, the museum is fortunate to hold two of Gaudier-Brzeska’s marble sculptures in its collection, Female Torso 3, and Water Carrier, both currently on display in Archive Hall.

Menagerie includes a number of artworks depicting animals held in zoos and aquariums, from Dorothy Shakespear’s studies at Rome’s Zoological Gardens, to Henry Horenstein’s Beluga Whale. While zoological institutions can be problematic, they have enabled visitors—including artists—to familiarize themselves with animals that they would not be likely to encounter otherwise. Moreover, it is much easier to depict a creature contained in a circumscribed area. Access to a zoo enabled Gaudier-Brzeska to broaden the range of animals that he was able to depict from life, and the energy and verve of these drawings demonstrates the value that studying these animals brought to his practice.

Many of the artworks featured in Menagerie encourage visitors to pay attention to the creatures that exist alongside us in our wider environment, and Gaudier-Brzeska was deeply attuned to the natural world. Unfortunately, he died aged just 23 in June 1915 while fighting for France during World War I. In just a few short years, Gaudier-Brzeska had established himself as one of Britain’s preeminent avant-garde modern artists, and the Wellin is privileged to hold such a fascinating selection of his work.

Images caption: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Untitled (Animal Sketches), c. 1912-13. Graphite on paper, 8 x 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. Gift of Omar S. Pound, Class of 1951. Image courtesy of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.

Accession numbers for individual works:
1984.445 = birds
1984.449 = elephant
1984.435 = lion
1984.433 = wolf