The animal has always been inextricably linked withman. Meat from time immemorial was used for food, skins made clothes. Evolution gradually opened and expanded forms of contact with the animal: the tamed beast became a real partner: the dogs guarded the flocks and dwellings, horses became the object of movement, cows and goats gave milk. The list, as you understand, is incredibly long.

Animals, living near a person, became involuntarilyand the object of observation, embodied in the drawings. Animalistic painting originated in the ancient world. Everyone heard about the drawings on the rocks. The Sphinxes personified the unity of the animal and human world, the bull symbolized strength, the cat - grace and natural wisdom. The animal gradually became a means of spiritual development of people, the embodiment of beauty, perfection. So there was an animalistic genre.

The amazing beauty of the living world is sung by the galaxyanimal artists. The world-famous Vatagin, for example, literally humanized animals, reflecting arrogance, significance, severity, melancholy, sadness. The analogy between animal and human made it possible to make the image of the animal more understandable, more capacious, to understand behavior and actions.

Animalistic genre is not only a partfine arts, but also a part of literature. After all, when mentioning animals in literature (tales, essays, stories, satires, fables), we involuntarily try on them a human image, human features, or extolling and glorifying, or exposing.

The great master Vasily Vatagin not only wroteanimals, but also carved images on a stone, cut them out of wood. "A man takes a lot from an animal, receives a lot from him, but seldom realizes that the animal is not only a force, not just meat." In our hands is a living being, often submissively suffering violence, suffering and at the same time understanding the good that corresponds to the same: deep affection, love, devotion, "he said.

The same attitude was expressed in their paintings andother well-known animal artists: I. Yuanji (Chinese artist, 11th century); Frans Snyders, Jan Wildens, Jan Faith (Flemish painters of the 15th-16th centuries), Paulus Potter (Holland, XVI century), Mori Sosen (Japan, XVII century), Agasset (Swiss painter, 18th century), Frenchman Eugene Delacroix (XVIII) c), Russian sculptor Peter Klodt, French painter Philip Russo, Brighton Rivier (English painter), German sculptor August Gaul, Russian sculptors and painters Vatagin, Groot, Sverchkov, Lansere and others.

Today, one of the brightest animal artistsis, perhaps, the Canadian Robert Bateman, carried away the genre as early as 12 years. For a few years, Impressionism, an interest in post-impressionism "a la Van Gogh", and the period of Cubism, and impressionistic abstraction were experienced and fascinated by Impressionism. But all the stages were permeated with nature. Being a naturalist in essence, the artist sought to reflect nature with the greatest possible accuracy. In the thirties, Robert Bateman was imbued with paintings by Andrew Wyatt, a realist artist. It was then that Bateman came to the emancipation and vision of the individual path in art, to which he is faithful even now. The animal world, reflected in the paintings of Bateman, is diverse to infinity. This is not a rest, not a way to earn money. It is a titanic work saturated with love and an inexhaustible source of new ideas. An animistic genre has become for Robert Bateman a way of life. His paintings do not leave anyone indifferent.

Animalistic genre is not just a mappingnot just paintings that have absorbed the love of the artists who wrote them, it is also an excuse, and a call to think again about the involvement in the displayed world, about the incredibly close connection with it, about how fragile it is, this world and how it depends on us with you...