Elephants in art run from Andrea Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar, begun in the 1480s, to Max Ernst's Celebes of 1921 and Salvador Dalí's stilted herd of 1946. These twelve famous works show painters drawing the animal from life, from a copy or from a text.
For most of art history, a painter asked for an elephant had probably never seen one. Some worked from a real animal that crossed their city, others from a line in an old book.
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How These Were Chosen
Outside Africa and South and Southeast Asia, living elephants were rare for most of history. One might arrive as a gift from one ruler to another, or travel from town to town as a paid attraction.
That rarity turned the animal into a test. A huge body, a trunk and loose folds of skin are hard to get right without a model in front of the easel, and each picture below shows how much its maker really knew.
To make this list, the elephant has to matter to the story the work tells, through its size, its use in war, its strangeness or even its near absence. The order runs from the least familiar work, at the top of the page, to the most celebrated, at the end.
12. Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes (1921)
In Celebes, a squat gray body with a round, swollen belly fills the middle of the canvas. A hose hangs from its front like a trunk, and on top sits a bull's head with two small white horns. A headless female figure stands beside it.
Max Ernst, a German painter soon to join the Surrealists in Paris, built this creature in 1921. Its body never belonged to an animal. Ernst started from a photograph of a Sudanese grain bin, a fat clay container raised on two short legs, and turned it into something closer to a sinister machine than to a beast.
The method was a habit with him. He would take an image he had found, add parts or remove them, and keep going until an ordinary object became disturbing. Here the clay belly became the body, and a hanging tube and a pair of horns were enough to make the eye read the rest.
Of the twelve works here, Celebes is the one furthest from a real animal. Only its bulk and its trunk say elephant, and Ernst counted on the viewer to supply everything else.
The title is borrowed as well. Celebes, the old name of an Indonesian island, is the first word of a crude German schoolboys' rhyme that Ernst remembered.
At a Glance
Artist: Max Ernst (1891 to 1976)
Painted: 1921
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Size: 125.4 × 107.9 cm (49.4 × 42.5 in)
Where to see it: Tate Modern, London
11. Pietro Longhi, The Elephant (1774)
Venice put an elephant on show in 1774, and the whole city came to look at it, in winter clothes and carnival masks. Pietro Longhi, who made his name painting small scenes of Venetian daily life, painted that crowd the same year.
High in the upper left corner of the canvas, above the heads of the crowd, he added a few painted lines of text, like a sign hung over the scene. They say who paid for the picture, and what that man believed he was getting for his money.