Monkeys in Painting: 12 Works and Why the Ape Is Always Us
Monkeys in European painting almost always mean the same thing: humans behaving badly. A monkey chained to a table is greed, a monkey in fine clothes is vanity, and a monkey holding a brush is the painter mocking his own trade.
The ape in one minute
The Latin tag was ars simia naturae: art is the ape of nature. Painters used the monkey to laugh at their own copying.
A whole genre existed of monkeys dressed as people. It was called singerie.
Bruegel painted two chained monkeys in a window with Antwerp behind them, and nobody agrees what it means.
A monkey at a lady’s feet in a portrait is not a compliment.
And Frida Kahlo painted monkeys around her neck as company, not as a warning.
1 | Two Monkeys, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562)
Two monkeys chained in a stone window arch, hazelnut shells at their feet, and the harbour of Antwerp behind them. The panel is small, around twenty by twenty three centimetres.
Readings range from the sin of greed to the city itself in chains. More on him in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
2 | The singerie, or monkeys as people
From the seventeenth century, painters filled rooms with monkeys smoking, barbering, gambling and painting. David Teniers the Younger made a speciality of monkey guardrooms and monkey kitchens.
The joke only works if the viewer recognises the human scene being copied. More in what is genre painting.
3 | The monkey painter
Chardin painted a monkey at an easel, dressed and concentrating, and a second one examining an antique. It is the artist admitting that painting is imitation.
More on him in Jean Simeon Chardin.
4 | Monkeys in Bosch
Bosch drops apes into hell scenes and into the crowded middle panel, where they ride, carry and torment, sitting exactly on the line between animal and demon.
More on him in Hieronymus Bosch.
5 | The chained monkey in portraits
An exotic pet on a chain told the viewer the sitter had money and reach. It also told a moralising viewer that the sitter had appetites.
The reading system is set out in what is iconography.
6 | Rubens, Jordaens and the Flemish menagerie
Antwerp had a port, so it had animals, and painters had live models. Rubens and his circle painted monkeys from life rather than from bestiaries.
More on him in Peter Paul Rubens.
7 | Frida Kahlo and her spider monkeys
Kahlo kept spider monkeys at the Casa Azul and painted them wrapped around her shoulders, close to her face, sometimes with an arm across her chest.
Here the animal is protective, not accusing. More on her in Frida Kahlo.
8 | The monkey and the mirror
A monkey holding a mirror is a double joke: vanity twice over, since the mirror already meant vanity and the ape already meant imitation.
Painters loaded symbols on top of each other when they wanted a moral to be unmissable.
9 | Stubbs and the animal painted straight
By the eighteenth century, natural history changed the terms. Monkeys began to be painted as specimens, observed and recorded rather than moralised.
That shift ends the singerie almost completely.
10 | Monkeys in Mughal and Persian painting
In Mughal miniatures monkeys appear as court entertainers and in fables, and the tone is closer to observation than to moral warning.
More on the format in what is miniature painting.
11 | Landseer and the Victorian human animal
Victorian painting gave animals human expressions on purpose, and the public loved it. The monkey was the easiest sell, since it already looked halfway there.
Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859, and the imagery changed meaning around it.
12 | Why the monkey survived every style
Every century used it for the same job: to say something about people without saying it directly. The animal is a disguise the painter can hide a criticism inside.
The monkey is never the subject. We are.
Apes on canvas, questions people ask
What does a monkey symbolise in painting? Usually foolishness, greed, lust or imitation. Chained, it means appetite controlled or wealth displayed.
What is a singerie? A picture of monkeys dressed as humans doing human activities, popular from the seventeenth century, notably by David Teniers the Younger.
What does Bruegel’s Two Monkeys mean? Nobody agrees. Readings include greed, the enslavement of Antwerp, and the soul in captivity. The panel is dated 1562.
Why did Frida Kahlo paint monkeys? She kept spider monkeys as pets at the Casa Azul and painted them as companions rather than as symbols of vice.
Where can I see them? The Gemaldegalerie in Berlin for Bruegel, the Louvre for Chardin, the Prado for Bosch.
The line I find most useful: ars simia naturae, art is the ape of nature. When a painter put a monkey at an easel, he was calling his own profession a clever act of copying, and he did it in paint.
More painted monkeys sit at the Met and the Rijksmuseum.