Bears in Painting: 12 Works and Why They Look So Wrong
Bears are painted badly for a simple reason: almost no European painter had seen one alive. Medieval bestiary bears are dogs with long snouts, and the animal only starts looking like a bear once painters could visit a menagerie or a zoo.
Bears, briefly
Medieval bears were drawn from other drawings, and it shows.
The bear was believed to lick its shapeless cubs into shape, which is where the phrase comes from.
Bear baiting was a public entertainment, and prints of it sold well.
Russian painters made the bear a national animal in the nineteenth century.
The most famous bear painting was largely painted by somebody else.
1 | Morning in a Pine Forest, Ivan Shishkin (1889)
Shishkin painted the forest and the mist. The four bear cubs were painted by his friend Konstantin Savitsky, whose signature the dealer Tretyakov had removed.
It became the most reproduced picture in Russia, on chocolate wrappers included.
2 | The bestiary bear
Medieval manuscripts show bears as long muzzled dogs, because the illuminator was copying an earlier copy. Nobody in the chain had seen the animal.
More on the format in what is an illuminated manuscript.
3 | Licked into shape
Ancient and medieval writers believed bear cubs were born formless and licked into shape by the mother. The idea appears in painting as a mother bear working on a shapeless lump.
The English phrase survives, the belief does not.
4 | Bear baiting in prints
Bear gardens operated beside London theatres, and prints of the baiting sold to the same audience. It is a brutal subject treated as sport.
More on the medium in what is engraving.
5 | Bears in Bruegel and the Netherlandish crowd
Northern painters put dancing bears with their handlers into village scenes, because a chained bear on a rope was a real thing you would see at a fair.
More on him in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
6 | Callisto and the constellation
In myth Callisto is turned into a bear and placed in the sky as the Great Bear. Titian painted the moment of her disgrace, and it is one of the great mythological cycles.
More on him in Titian.
Titian painted that cycle for Philip II, and I rate the whole set in 7 secrets hidden in famous paintings.
7 | The heraldic bear
Bern is named for a bear and carries one on its arms, and Berlin has one too. Civic painting in those cities is full of bears standing upright and holding things.
A heraldic animal never has to look real.
8 | The polar bear enters painting
Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century brought polar bears into European pictures, usually on ice beside a wrecked ship, as a sign of a place that does not want you.
More in ice and frozen scenes in art.
9 | Landseer and the animal with feelings
Victorian animal painting gave bears human expressions, and audiences loved it. Accuracy of anatomy improved at exactly the moment sentiment took over.
More on the world it came from in what is romanticism art.
10 | The Russian bear as politics
British and French caricaturists drew Russia as a bear from the eighteenth century onward. Russian painters answered by making the bear noble and at home in the forest.
The same animal, two opposite arguments.
11 | Bears in Japanese art
The bear appears in Ainu culture in northern Japan with real ritual importance, and enters Japanese painting through that northern tradition rather than through European bestiaries.
More on him in Katsushika Hokusai.
12 | Why bears are painted so rarely
They were dangerous, hard to see, and carried no fixed Christian meaning, so a painter had little reason to include one. Lions had symbolism and dogs had loyalty. The bear had neither.
When you do find one, it is usually a fair, a myth or a coat of arms.
Bears on canvas, questions readers ask
Who painted Morning in a Pine Forest? Ivan Shishkin painted the landscape in 1889 and Konstantin Savitsky painted the bear cubs. Savitsky’s signature was removed by the dealer.
Why do medieval bears look wrong? Illuminators copied earlier drawings rather than live animals, so the bear drifts towards a long muzzled dog.
What does licked into shape mean? An old belief that bear cubs were born formless and shaped by the mother’s tongue. The phrase outlived the belief.
Why is Russia drawn as a bear? European caricaturists used the bear for Russia from the eighteenth century, and Russian painters answered with a noble forest version.
Where can I see these? The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow for Shishkin, the National Gallery for Titian’s Diana and Callisto.
The most reproduced painting in Russian history has a co author whose name was scrubbed off the canvas by the man who bought it, because one signature sold better than two.
Two collections worth an hour of your time: the Met and the Rijksmuseum.