Beast in show: why animals rule the art world

Art began with animals – just look at Mayan jaguars, Egyptian cats and the painted bison in Lascaux. The particularly British love affair with the equestrian and canine is ingrained in its art history: see George Stubbs’ regal, romantic horses, Van Dyck’s painting of King Charles II as a child with his eponymous spaniel and Edwin Landseer’s portraits of Queen Victoria’s pets. Jacques Derrida wrote in The Animal That Therefore I Am that “the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human”. Yet they can also be funny, satirical – cue the craze for images of dogs urinating in the corner of many 18th-century engravings.