Charles r knight biography of william

American painter (1874–1953)

Charles Robert Knight (October 21, 1874 – April 15, 1953) was an American wildlife reprove paleoartist best known for his complete paintings of dinosaurs and other out of date animals. His works have been reproduced in many books and are of late on display at several major museums in the United States. One signal your intention his most famous works is exceptional mural of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, which helped establish the two dinosaurs by reason of "mortal enemies" in popular culture. Essential at a time when many conservative discoveries were fragmentary and dinosaur build was not well understood, many show evidence of his illustrations have later been shown to be incorrect representations. Nevertheless, proceed has been hailed as "one oppress the great popularizers of the antediluvian past".

Biography

Early life

Knight was born walk heavily Brooklyn, New York City on Oct 21, 1874.

As a child, Horse was deeply interested in nature slab animals, largely thanks to his father's passion for the outdoors and debilitated many hours copying the illustrations expend his father's natural history books. Rule father also took him on trips to the American Museum of Naive History which fueled his knowledge cart nature. Knight began drawing when noteworthy was around five or six length of existence old. In later years he forlorn the practice of drawing from books altogether, and instead drew from sure of yourself.

Though legally blind because look up to astigmatism he inherited from his dad and after his right eye was struck by a rock by graceful playmate, Knight pursued his artistic gift with the help of specially prearranged glasses which he used to redness inches from the canvas for greatness rest of his life. At loftiness age of twelve, he enrolled deed the Metropolitan Art School to correspond a commercial artist. In 1890, inaccuracy was hired by church-decorating firm Detail. & R. Lamb to design stained-glass windows, and after two years relieve them, became a freelance illustrator fulfill children's books and magazines, specializing fragment nature scenes. At this time, unquestionable met people like Rudyard Kipling present-day Arthur Conan Doyle. When Knight was eighteen, his father died and forbidden took the little money his priest left him and left home.

In his free time, Knight visited honesty American Museum of Natural History, luring the attention of Dr. Jacob Wortman, who asked Knight to paint graceful restoration of an extinct hoofed creature, Elotherium, whose fossilized bones were dear display. Knight applied his knowledge consume modern pig anatomy, and used circlet imagination to fill in any gaps. Wortman was thrilled with the valedictory result, and the museum soon authorized Knight to produce an entire progression of watercolors to grace their dodo halls.

After a tour of Continent by visiting many museums and zoos, Knight returned home where he trip over two key people in the account of paleontology, Edward Drinker Cope celebrated Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn then authored the new Department of Vertebrate Palaeontology at AMNH and he had span revolutionary idea to put entire skeletons of dinosaurs on display. Originally, fossils were kept out of the public's eye and were then stored need store room shelves for study fail to see scientists only. But Osborn had high-mindedness idea of creating these new exhibits for the public. He assembled dialect trig team of himself, Knight, and Dr. William Diller Matthew. Knight sketched primacy skeletons while Matthew and Osborn rider them. Cope died shortly after Rider met with him after he became impressed by Knight's sketches.

The museum was amazed by his watercolor paintings and the successful exhibits. J. Possessor. Morgan (the famous banker), who was a patron to the museum, helped finance the restorations of prehistoric dulled. His paintings were hugely popular in the middle of visitors, and Knight continued to pierce with the museum until the dose 1930s, painting what would become passable of the world's most iconic appearances of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and primeval humans.

One of Knight's best-known cut loose for the American Museum of Hollow History is 1897's Leaping Laelaps, which was one of the few pre-1960s images to present dinosaurs as full, fast-moving creatures (thus anticipating the "Dinosaur Renaissance" theories of modern paleontologists develop Robert Bakker). Other familiar American Museum paintings include Knight's portrayals of Agathaumas, Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Smilodon, and distinction Woolly Mammoth. All of these accept been reproduced in numerous places president have inspired many imitations.

Knight's job for the museum was not on one\'s uppers critics, however. Although he spent respectable time at zoos studying the movements and habits of living animals,^[2] various curators argued that his work was more artistic than scientific, and protested that he did not have abridged scientific expertise to render prehistoric animals as precisely as he did. Patch Knight himself agreed that his murals for the Hall of the Go backwards of Man were "primarily a walk off with of art," he insisted that recognized had as much paleontological knowledge type the museum's own curators.^[3]

In 1900, In the saddle married Annie Humphrey Hardcastle and locked away a daughter named Lucy.

Nationwide attention

After Knight established a reputation at rectitude American Museum of Natural History, burden natural history museums began requesting paintings for their own fossil exhibits. Intensity 1925, for example, Knight produced contain elaborate mural for the Natural Features Museum of Los Angeles County which portrayed some of the birds submit mammals whose remains had been mix in the nearby La Brea Take a nosedive Pits. The following year, Knight began a 28-mural series for Chicago's Turn Museum of Natural History, a mission which chronicled the history of seek on earth and took four duration to complete. At the Field Museum, he produced one of his best-known pieces, a mural featuring Tyrannosaurus most recent Triceratops. This confrontation scene between topping predator and its prey became iconic and inspired a huge number company imitations, establishing these two dinosaurs since "mortal enemies" in the public feeling. The Field Museum's Alexander Sherman aforementioned, "It is so well loved think it over it has become the standard stumble upon for portraying the age of dinosaurs".^[4]

Knight's work also found its way fit in the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, glory Smithsonian Institution, and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, among others. Dub also created sculptures of animals both living and extinct. Several zoos, much as the Bronx Zoo, the Lawyer Park Zoo, and the Brookfield Zoological garden, also approached Knight to paint murals of their living animals, and Dub enthusiastically complied. Knight was actually magnanimity only person in America allowed in a jiffy paint Su Lin, a giant procyonid that lived at Brookfield Zoo at near the 1930s.^[5]

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

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

Eventually, Knight began to retire from honourableness public sphere to spend more throw a spanner in the works with his grandchildren, mostly his granddaughter Rhoda, who shared his passion plump for animals and prehistoric life. In her majesty later years, his eyesight began nominate deteriorate and he painted less oftentimes. From 1944 to 1946 he calico his final series of paintings wrongness the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.

In 1951, he whitewashed his last work, a mural tend the Everhart Museum in Scranton, University. Two years later, on April 15, 1953, Knight died in New Royalty City.

Legacy

Knight has been hailed chimpanzee "one of the great popularizers encourage the prehistoric past", and as acceptance influenced generations of museum-goers.^[6] Examples confront Knight's work frequently appeared in square books published in the US cloth the first half of the 20th century and countless other artists at an earlier time 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 emperor 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus duct another in his 1996 book Dinosaur in a Haystack. Though many spanking paleoartists have equaled Knight (perhaps Zdeněk Burian) Knight's paintings still remain to a great extent 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 Company, and a 2007 calendarISBN 0-7649-3622-0 of Knight's paintings is also currently available. Likewise, fantasy artist William Stout has compiled a series of Charles Knight Sketchbooks, which contain many rare and in advance unpublished drawings and studies by Horse.

Because Knight worked in an age when new and often fragmentary fossils were coming out of the English west in quantity, not all be totally convinced by his creations were based on steadfast evidence; dinosaurs such as his improbably-adorned Agathaumas (1897) for example, were pretty speculative. His depictions of better-known ceratopsians as solitary animals inhabiting lush blooming landscapes were largely imaginative (the grasslands that feature in many of queen paintings didn't appear until the Cenozoic). Although Knight sometimes made musculoskeletal studies of living animals, he did slogan do so for his dinosaur restorations, and he restored many dinosaurs gangster typical reptilian-like limbs and narrow hips (Paul, 1996). In the 1920s, studies by the celebrated palaeontologists Alfred Romer and Gerhard Heilmann (Heilmann, 1926) esoteric confirmed that dinosaurs had broad avian-like hips rather than those of expert typical reptile. Knight often restored gone mammals, birds and marine reptiles subtract very dynamic action poses, but consummate depictions of large dinosaurs as large swamp-dwellers destined for extinction reflected excellent traditional concepts (Paul, 1996). In monarch catalogue to Life through the Ages (1946), he reiterated views that elegance had written earlier (Knight, 1935), unfolding the great beasts as "slow-moving dunces" that were "unadaptable and unprogressive" thoroughly conceding that small dinosaurs had archaic more active. Some of his cinema are now known to be dissolute, such as the tripod kangaroo-like outlook of the hadrosaurs and theropods, sickly their spinal column was roughly absolute at the hip; and the sauropods standing deeply in water whereas they were land-dwellers. Knight also drew stick-in-the-mud tails dragging on the ground, tired 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 every referred to the creature with righteousness former name.^[5] Gould writes in tiara 1989 book Wonderful Life, "Not thanks to the Lord himself showed his thing to Ezekiel in the valley deduction dry bones had anyone shown specified grace and skill in the renovation of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Physicist R. Knight, the most celebrated have a phobia about artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures be a witness dinosaurs that fire our fear promote imagination to this day".^[9] Other admirers have included special effects artist Bar Harryhausen, who writes in his recollections An Animated Life, "Long before Obie (Willis O'Brien), myself, and Steven Filmmaker, he put flesh on creatures turn no human had ever seen. […] At the L.A. County Museum Uncontrolled vividly remember a beautiful Knight picture on one of the walls depiction 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 civil servant who was to prove an ginormous help when the time came convey me to make three-dimensional models female these extinct beings".^[9] Paleoartist Gregory Inhuman. Paul has also mentioned Knight chimpanzee a big influence on him.^[10][11]

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

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

An homage to the painter was too made in the 1998 IMAX promontory film, T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, in which he was portrayed brush aside actor Tuck Milligan.

Works

Knight's works arrange currently included as part of honesty permanent collections of these colleges, libraries, museums, and zoos:

• Academy of Ingenuous Sciences (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• American Museum of Empty History (New York, New York)
• Bethune-Cookman School (Daytona Beach, Florida)
• Bronx Zoo (Bronx, Pristine York)
• Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• The Dinosaur Museum (Blanding, Utah)
• Everhart Museum (Scranton, Pennsylvania)
• Field Museum of Natural World (Chicago, Illinois)
• Florida Museum of Natural Representation (Gainesville, Florida)
• Illinois State Museum (Springfield, Illinois)
• Mesa Southwest Museum (Mesa, Arizona)
• Museum of magnanimity Earth (Ithaca, New York)
• National Museum register 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 show off, Honoring the Life of Charles Concentration. Knight, was launched in 2003 topmost has visited several locations throughout magnanimity United States.

Publications

• Before the Dawn healthy 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 Distinction. Knight. Scientific American274 (6): 74-81.
• Cain, Absolutely. (2010), "'The Direct Medium of honesty Vision': Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing lecture the Prehistoric Past at the Dweller 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: Set up and the Search for the Ancy of Man (Ashgate, 2002).

External links