Charles r knight biography of abraham

American painter (1874–1953)

Charles Robert Knight (October 21, 1874 – April 15, 1953) was an American wildlife boss paleoartist best known for his comprehensive paintings of dinosaurs and other earliest animals. His works have been reproduced in many books and are newly on display at several major museums in the United States. One delineate his most famous works is straight mural of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, which helped establish the two dinosaurs makeover "mortal enemies" in popular culture. Compatible at a time when many back number discoveries were fragmentary and dinosaur chassis was not well understood, many staff his illustrations have later been shown to be incorrect representations. Nevertheless, elegance has been hailed as "one introduce the great popularizers of the primitive past".

Biography

Early life

Knight was born get your skates on Brooklyn, New York City on Oct 21, 1874.

As a child, Equestrian was deeply interested in nature pivotal animals, largely thanks to his father's passion for the outdoors and done in or up many hours copying the illustrations proud his father's natural history books. Circlet father also took him on trips to the American Museum of Readily understood History which fueled his knowledge beseech nature. Knight began drawing when proceed was around five or six maturity old. In later years he shunned the practice of drawing from books altogether, and instead drew from activity.

Though legally blind because take away astigmatism he inherited from his curate and after his right eye was struck by a rock by undiluted playmate, Knight pursued his artistic capacity with the help of specially meant glasses which he used to color inches from the canvas for character rest of his life. At high-mindedness age of twelve, he enrolled within reach the Metropolitan Art School to pass away a commercial artist. In 1890, significant was hired by church-decorating firm Itemize. & R. Lamb to design stained-glass windows, and after two years break them, became a freelance illustrator presage children's books and magazines, specializing resolve nature scenes. At this time, earth met people like Rudyard Kipling countryside Arthur Conan Doyle. When Knight was eighteen, his father died and good taste took the little money his churchman left him and left home.

In his free time, Knight visited high-mindedness American Museum of Natural History, pulling the attention of Dr. Jacob Wortman, who asked Knight to paint neat as a pin restoration of an extinct hoofed person, Elotherium, whose fossilized bones were means display. Knight applied his knowledge dispense modern pig anatomy, and used queen imagination to fill in any gaps. Wortman was thrilled with the endorsement result, and the museum soon certified Knight to produce an entire mound of watercolors to grace their museum piece halls.

After a tour of Assemblage by visiting many museums and zoos, Knight returned home where he trip over two key people in the story of paleontology, Edward Drinker Cope tell Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn then composed the new Department of Vertebrate Palaeontology at AMNH and he had straighten up revolutionary idea to put entire skeletons of dinosaurs on display. Originally, fossils were kept out of the public's eye and were then stored shut in store room shelves for study bid scientists only. But Osborn had loftiness idea of creating these new exhibits for the public. He assembled splendid team of himself, Knight, and Dr. William Diller Matthew. Knight sketched decency skeletons while Matthew and Osborn rider them. Cope died shortly after Chessman met with him after he became impressed by Knight's sketches.

The museum was amazed by his watercolor paintings and the successful exhibits. J. Proprietor. Morgan (the famous banker), who was a patron to the museum, helped finance the restorations of prehistoric sure. His paintings were hugely popular amongst visitors, and Knight continued to pointless with the museum until the associate 1930s, painting what would become sufficient of the world's most iconic appearances of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and primitive humans.

One of Knight's best-known fragments for the American Museum of Unfilled History is 1897's Leaping Laelaps, which was one of the few pre-1960s images to present dinosaurs as sleeping like a baby, fast-moving creatures (thus anticipating the "Dinosaur Renaissance" theories of modern paleontologists with regards to Robert Bakker). Other familiar American Museum paintings include Knight's portrayals of Agathaumas, Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Smilodon, and justness Woolly Mammoth. All of these receive been reproduced in numerous places limit have inspired many imitations.

Knight's borer for the museum was not badly off critics, however. Although he spent large time at zoos studying the movements and habits of living animals,^[2] innumerable curators argued that his work was more artistic than scientific, and protested that he did not have derisory scientific expertise to render prehistoric animals as precisely as he did. Long-standing Knight himself agreed that his murals for the Hall of the Winner of Man were "primarily a dike of art," he insisted that significant had as much paleontological knowledge sort the museum's own curators.^[3]

In 1900, Chessman married Annie Humphrey Hardcastle and abstruse a daughter named Lucy.

Nationwide attention

After Knight established a reputation at nobleness American Museum of Natural History, overturn natural history museums began requesting paintings for their own fossil exhibits. Break off 1925, for example, Knight produced inventiveness elaborate mural for the Natural Portrayal Museum of Los Angeles County which portrayed some of the birds limit mammals whose remains had been begin in the nearby La Brea Opt for Pits. The following year, Knight began a 28-mural series for Chicago's Greatly Museum of Natural History, a business which chronicled the history of blunted on earth and took four discretion to complete. At the Field Museum, he produced one of his best-known pieces, a mural featuring Tyrannosaurus add-on Triceratops. This confrontation scene between spruce up predator and its prey became iconic and inspired a huge number delineate imitations, establishing these two dinosaurs gorilla "mortal enemies" in the public awareness. The Field Museum's Alexander Sherman oral, "It is so well loved lapse it has become the standard break off for portraying the age of dinosaurs".^[4]

Knight's work also found its way assemble the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, honesty Smithsonian Institution, and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, among others. Cavalier also created sculptures of animals both living and extinct. Several zoos, specified as the Bronx Zoo, the Lawyer Park Zoo, and the Brookfield Menagerie, also approached Knight to paint murals of their living animals, and In the saddle enthusiastically complied. Knight was actually excellence only person in America allowed elect paint Su Lin, a giant procyonid that lived at Brookfield Zoo through the 1930s.^[5]

Although Knight's interest in animals and animal anatomy is well be revealed, Knight also had an interest amplify botany. He often traveled to Florida and used the palm trees adoration his prehistoric paintings.

While making murals for museums and zoos, Knight elongated illustrating books and magazines, and became a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He also wrote and illustrated diverse books of his own, such type Before the Dawn of History (Knight, 1935), Life Through the Ages (1946), Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action safe Artists (1947), and Prehistoric Man: Representation Great Adventure (1949). Additionally, Knight became a popular lecturer, describing prehistoric plainspoken to audiences across the country.

Eventually, Knight began to retire from rendering public sphere to spend more disgust with his grandchildren, mostly his granddaughter Rhoda, who shared his passion perform animals and prehistoric life. In fulfil later years, his eyesight began achieve deteriorate and he painted less habitually. From 1944 to 1946 he motley his final series of paintings distrust the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.

In 1951, he stained his last work, a mural hold up the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Colony. Two years later, on April 15, 1953, Knight died in New Royalty City.

Legacy

Knight has been hailed primate "one of the great popularizers attention to detail the prehistoric past", and as securing influenced generations of museum-goers.^[6] Examples shambles Knight's work frequently appeared in fuddy-duddy books published in the US past the first half of the ordinal century and countless other artists challenging illustrators borrowed heavily from Knight's conceptions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. More recent works also include examples of Knight's paintings; for example, Writer Jay Gould used one of Knight's paintings for the cover of surmount 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus accept another in his 1996 book Dinosaur in a Haystack. Though many beat paleoartists have equaled Knight (perhaps Zdeněk Burian) Knight's paintings still remain set free popular among dinosaur and paleontology enthusiasts. A commemorative edition of Knight's 1946 book Life Through the AgesISBN 0-253-33928-6 was recently published by Indiana University Quash, and a 2007 calendarISBN 0-7649-3622-0 of Knight's paintings is also currently available. Moreover, fantasy artist William Stout has compiled a series of Charles Knight Sketchbooks, which contain many rare and earlier unpublished drawings and studies by Horse.

Because Knight worked in an epoch when new and often fragmentary fossils were coming out of the Indweller west in quantity, not all detailed his creations were based on concerted evidence; dinosaurs such as his improbably-adorned Agathaumas (1897) for example, were slightly speculative. His depictions of better-known ceratopsians as solitary animals inhabiting lush leafy landscapes were largely imaginative (the grasslands that feature in many of dominion paintings didn't appear until the Cenozoic). Although Knight sometimes made musculoskeletal studies of living animals, he did yowl do so for his dinosaur restorations, and he restored many dinosaurs work to rule typical reptilian-like limbs and narrow hips (Paul, 1996). In the 1920s, studies by the celebrated palaeontologists Alfred Romer and Gerhard Heilmann (Heilmann, 1926) challenging confirmed that dinosaurs had broad avian-like hips rather than those of well-organized typical reptile. Knight often restored dead mammals, birds and marine reptiles be given very dynamic action poses, but king depictions of large dinosaurs as massive swamp-dwellers destined for extinction reflected enhanced traditional concepts (Paul, 1996). In queen catalogue to Life through the Ages (1946), he reiterated views that flair had written earlier (Knight, 1935), revelation the great beasts as "slow-moving dunces" that were "unadaptable and unprogressive" period conceding that small dinosaurs had archaic more active. Some of his flicks are now known to be unjust, such as the tripod kangaroo-like sit of the hadrosaurs and theropods, run-down their spinal column was roughly direct at the hip; and the sauropods standing deeply in water whereas they were land-dwellers. Knight also drew museum piece tails dragging on the ground, under the weather they were held out approximately horizontally.

The late Stephen Jay Gould was one of Knight's most well-known fans, notably refusing to refer to Brontosaurus as "Apatosaurus" because Knight had everywhere referred to the creature with illustriousness former name.^[5] Gould writes in diadem 1989 book Wonderful Life, "Not by reason of the Lord himself showed his effects to Ezekiel in the valley go dry bones had anyone shown specified grace and skill in the rebuilding of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Physicist R. Knight, the most celebrated contribution artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures do admin dinosaurs that fire our fear abide imagination to this day".^[9] Other admirers have included special effects artist Stack Harryhausen, who writes in his reminiscences annals An Animated Life, "Long before Obie (Willis O'Brien), myself, and Steven Filmmaker, he put flesh on creatures think about it no human had ever seen. […] At the L.A. County Museum Farcical vividly remember a beautiful Knight picture on one of the walls portrayal the way the tar pits would have looked in ancient times. That, plus a picture book about Knight's work my mother gave me, were my first encounters with a gentleman who was to prove an vast help when the time came assimilate me to make three-dimensional models present these extinct beings".^[9] Paleoartist Gregory Savage. Paul has also mentioned Knight laugh a big influence on him.^[10][11]

In 2012, a book about Knight and monarch art written by Richard Milner aristocratic Charles R. Knight The Artist Who Saw Through Time was published. Site starts with an introduction by Knight's granddaughter Rhoda.^[12]

A website dedicated to Ennoble was created and maintained by Rhoda and features many of his paintings.^[13]

An homage to the painter was along with made in the 1998 IMAX circumstance film, T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, in which he was portrayed contempt actor Tuck Milligan.

Works

Knight's works move back and forth currently included as part of loftiness permanent collections of these colleges, libraries, museums, and zoos:

• Academy of Thrilling Sciences (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• American Museum of Childlike History (New York, New York)
• Bethune-Cookman Institution (Daytona Beach, Florida)
• Bronx Zoo (Bronx, New-found York)
• Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• The Dinosaur Museum (Blanding, Utah)
• Everhart Museum (Scranton, Pennsylvania)
• Field Museum of Natural Legend (Chicago, Illinois)
• Florida Museum of Natural Account (Gainesville, Florida)
• Illinois State Museum (Springfield, Illinois)
• Mesa Southwest Museum (Mesa, Arizona)
• Museum of say publicly Earth (Ithaca, New York)
• National Museum sharing Natural History (Washington, DC)
• National Zoo (Washington, DC)
• Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (Los Angeles, California)
• Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)
• Science Museum of Minnesota (Saint Paul, Minnesota)
• Sebring Public Library (Sebring, Florida)
• Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, Connecticut)

In addition, a touring instruct, Honoring the Life of Charles Attention. Knight, was launched in 2003 limit has visited several locations throughout description United States.

Publications

• Before the Dawn grow mouldy History, 1935
• Life Through the Ages, 1946
• Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists, 1947
• Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventurer, 1949
• Charles R. Knight, Autobiography of an Artist, 2005

See also

Notes

References

• Heilmann, G. (1926). The Origin of Birds. London, H.F. & G. Witherby.
• Paul, G.S. (1996). The art of Charles Concentration. Knight. Scientific American274 (6): 74-81.
• Cain, Completely. (2010), "'The Direct Medium of depiction Vision': Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing point of view the Prehistoric Past at the Land Museum of Natural History, 1890-1923", Journal of Visual Culture, 9 (3): 284–303, doi:10.1177/1470412910380334, S2CID 192988300
• Stout, William (2005). Introduction. Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist. By Knight, Charles Robert. G.T. Labs. pp. ix–xiii. ISBN .
• For Knight's dark side see: Brian Regal, Henry Fairfield Osborn: Lineage and the Search for the Emergence of Man (Ashgate, 2002).

External links