For most of history, a painter who needed a bear had to work without one. So bears entered paintings through books, zoos, skulls and old sayings, and some came out looking like hounds or pigs. One of the best-loved bear pictures even hides a second painter, whose signature disappeared from the canvas.
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How These Were Chosen
A bear is a hard animal to paint from life. It is big, dangerous and rarely still, so painters long made do with substitutes: an older picture, a text, a skull, a chained animal at a fair.
That is why so many painted bears look like dogs, pigs or men in fur. Yet the same body made it worth painting. A bear can rear up and stand like a man, so painters had it wrestle hunters, carry baggage, found a city or trade on Wall Street.
Each bear here was chosen because it carries the story of its picture, and because its body shows how close the painter came to a real animal, or how little he needed one.
12. Briton Rivière, Beyond Man's Footsteps (1894)
Seen from behind, a polar bear stands on a high ledge above a frozen land. Before it, a low sun, orange red and half sunk below the horizon, lays gold and bright blue along its fur, across the far peaks and on the icicles hanging under the rock. The picture is called Beyond Man's Footsteps, and Briton Rivière, a British painter of animals, showed it in London in 1894.
Yet nothing in this Arctic was seen in the Arctic. Rivière never went north. His bear lived at the London Zoological Gardens, where Rivière is recorded sketching almost daily, and his ice came from a book. A great reader, he very likely knew The First Crossing of Greenland, which the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had published in English in 1890, as the art historian Diana Donald argues.
That book also explains the hour. In Nansen's pages, Greenland looks wildest when the sun sinks lowest and sets the sky ablaze, and that is the moment Rivière painted: a purple ring around the half-set sun, turquoise streams running down a glacier, snow turning a soft blue in the shadows. The zoo supplied the fur, and the explorer supplied everything around it.
Only the pose was the painter's own. Many Victorian animal painters posed their beasts like actors, with human feelings written on their faces. Rivière turned his bear away, as if glimpsed by chance, and an animal that ignores the viewer leaves the ice as empty of people as the title says.
At a Glance
Artist: Briton Rivière (1840 to 1920), British
Painted: About 1893 to 1894, exhibited 1894
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 119 × 184.5 cm (46.9 × 72.6 in)
Where to see it: Tate Britain, London
11. William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market (1879)
Above a stampede of bears and bulls, one bear goes flying through the air. The brawl fills the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, bears mauling and bulls goring, and in the foreground a huge bull carries itself like the winner.
William Holbrook Beard, an American painter who had spent years giving animals human manners, staged this riot in 1879. Yet not one of these animals came out of a forest, and one of them sits apart from the fight, busy with something no bear has ever cared about.