Famous painter of prehistoric murals for museums, Charles R. Knight - exclusive excerpt

When you think of dinosaurs, you are imagining them as envisioned by the artist Charles R. Knight 100 years ago.

American wildlife artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) spent a lifetime creating scientifically accurate and spectacularly beautiful images of Earth’s ancient past, from dinosaurs and mammoths to saber-toothed cats and early humans. For generations, his groundbreaking work has inspired scientists, artists, and filmmakers all over the world and shaped the way prehistoric times are imagined today.

This stunning volume gathers together both iconic and never-before-seen works from Knight’s days of sketching animals in the newly opened Bronx Zoo, to the decades spent creating murals of prehistoric species for the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum.

This month, Abrams published the beautiful art book, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time, by Richard Milner. Abrams has kindly given permission for me to run a selection of images from the book. Enjoy!

Knight’s 1897 painting of fighting dryptosaurs, called Leaping Laelops. Credit: © AMNH

Knight’s iconic painting of a tyrannosaur and triceratops facing off is a large mural in the Field Museum in Chicago. Credit: © Field Museum, CK5T

One of Knight’s renditions of the tar pits as they appeared ten thousand years ago features a saber-toothed cat and vulturelike Tetratornis, which was twice the size of a California condor. This painting was done for the American Museum of Natural History. Credit: © AMNH

This classic Knight mural (first painted in 1920, and restored 1994) from the American Museum of Natural History depicts a Cro-Magnon artist painting mammoths near the entrance of Font-de-Gaume. It was done before Knight’s visit to the cave, or he would have known that the frieze actually showed European bison, not woolly mammoths. Credit: © AMNH

Knight’s immense panorama of a herd of woolly mammoths and reindeer marching through the snow near the Somme River in France, painted in 1916 for the Hall of the Age of Man at the American Museum. Credit: © AMNH

Knight’s superb pencil drawings, from life, of an African elephant. Credit: Collection of the Bronx Zoo/© Rhoda Knight Kalt

Buy Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time on Amazon

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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suburbanhick

Admirable draughtsmanship and painting technique, but haven’t all of his theories about what dinosaurs really looked like proven to be inaccurate? I recall reading something at one point (back in the 80s) about how these renditions (and others that copied them) are essentially out to lunch, because he had based his reconstructions of the dinosaur bodies on extant reptiles and other quadrupeds instead of birds. Things like hip joints being located in the completely wrong areas to really allow for support of body mass and such. Not to be a party pooper, though – they are awesome renderings!
- sean
  
  Too late. You already pooped my party. If dinosaurs DIDN”T look like this, they certainly should have! (Unless of course they were even bigger and cooler-looking and more ferociously awesome.)
  - suburbanhick
    
    I think they did look “roughly” like this – ie. size, bi/quadrupedal, fangs, claws, etc. The book I read pointed out things more like anatomical errors, including some pretty technical stuff about locomotion, inertia, mass-to-bone density ratios, etc. And since then, of course, the incredible dinosaur fossils coming out of China have COMPLETELY rewritten the dino-book. Feathers, beaks – all kindza crazy stuff. They’ve even recently found pigment in one fossil, indicating what colour the thing’s feathers were!
    
    PS: Sorry ’bout harshing your buzz!
    - sean
      
      I was kidding. You’re right, there are more amazing things coming to light every day that change our understanding. I remember when Robert Bakker first came up with the bird theory 25 or 35 years ago. Change is good.
- jtegnell
  
  Knight was actually unusual for his time. The prevailing understanding then was that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, slothful creatures with low metabolisms like reptiles. Knight, as an artist who studied living animals, pictured them as dynamic. Virtually no contemporary paleontologist would have imagined two agile therapods leaping on one another as Knight did in the painting above.
  
  It’s true there have been plenty of revolutionary ideas and discoveries since Knight’s time, but taken in context, his vision of dinosaurs was more accurate than most of his contemporaries.
  - suburbanhick
    
    I expect you’re probably right as to his accuracy being better than his contemporaries. And even if it wasn’t, who cares? They’re still kickass paintings of giant, fierce dinosaurs that terrify and inspire to this day!
- Robert Holmen
  
  “Not to be a party pooper…” is pretty much the same self-presented get-out-of-jail card as “No disrespect, but…” and every bit as sincere.
  
  Saying that he was “out to lunch” is a needlessly dismissive remark. His “theories” seem to draw upon the best ideas available at the time from his numerous colleagues in the field of paleontology.
  - suburbanhick
    
    Perhaps I wasn’t being clear enough. I don’t mean to say that HE personally was out to lunch – of course he was working from the best material available to him at the time. What I mean is that those IDEAS themselves – the prevailing notions at that time – have been proven to be out to lunch. Which I admit is a somewhat flippant term, but I didn’t mean it in an overly derogatory sense. It’s not like I called him a ‘f***ing idiot’ or a ‘lying charlatan’ or anything unwontedly harsh. I sincerely hope/fully expect someone a hundred years from now will be debunking many of the theories of today, just as those of Knight’s time have been revised. You know – standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.
hogan

I had only a few heroes growing up in the 60′s: my dad, Jean Beliveau… and Charles R. Knight!
mothernatureseven

No one knows for sure that he was “creating scientifically accurate” pictures. For all we know for sure the dinos could have all been pale purple.
I have lived that saber toothed cat for over 60 years.
- technogeekagain
  
  Odds are that dinosaurs *did* come in a variety of colors and patterns. Consider modern lizards and birds.
  
  I’ve always considered the assumption that they were greyish to be an artifact of the plasticine used in early models and animations.
George Michaelson

Actually, some of us grew up on Burian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zden%C4%9Bk_Burian instead.
Antinous / Moderator

When is a crazy cat breeder going to come up with a saber-toothed housecat?