Charles R. Knight
Encyclopedia
Charles Robert Knight was an American
artist
best known for his influential painting
s of dinosaur
s and other prehistoric
animals. His works have been reproduced in many books and are currently on display at several major museum
s in the United States.
books. Though legally blind
because of astigmatism
and a subsequent injury to his right eye, Knight pursued his artistic talents with the help of specially-designed glasses, and at the age of twelve, he enrolled at the Metropolitan Art School
to become a commercial artist
. In 1890, he was hired by a church-decorating firm to design stained-glass windows
, and after two years with them, became a freelance
illustrator for books and magazine
s, specializing in nature scenes.
In his free time, Knight visited the American Museum of Natural History
, attracting the attention of Dr. Jacob Wortman, who asked Knight to paint a restoration of a prehistoric pig
, Elotherium, whose fossil
ized bones were on display. Though many artists at the time were reluctant to make such restorations, given the amount of guesswork involved, Knight applied his knowledge of modern pig anatomy
to make the painting as realistic as possible, and used his imagination to fill in any gaps. Wortman was thrilled with the final result, and the museum soon commissioned Knight to produce an entire series of watercolors to grace their fossil halls. Knight’s work for the museum was not without critics, however: many curators argued that his work was more artistic than scientific, and protested that he did not have sufficient scientific expertise to render prehistoric animals as precisely as he did. While Knight himself agreed with that his murals for the Hall of the Age of Man were “primarily a work of art,” he insisted that he had as much paleontological knowledge as the museum’s own curators. His paintings were hugely popular among visitors, and Knight continued to work with the museum well until the 1930s, painting what would become some of the world’s most celebrated images of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and prehistoric humans.
One of Knight's best-known pieces for the American Museum of Natural History is 1897’s Leaping Laelaps
, which was one of the few pre-1960s images to present dinosaurs as active, fast-moving creatures (thus anticipating the theories of modern paleontologists like Robert Bakker). Other familiar American Museum paintings include Knight’s portrayals of Agathaumas
, Allosaurus
, Brontosaurus
, Smilodon
, and the Woolly Mammoth
. All of these have been reproduced in numerous places and have inspired many imitations.
Soon, natural history museums throughout the country began requesting Knight paintings for their own fossil exhibits. In 1925, for example, Knight produced an elaborate mural for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
which portrayed some of the bird
s and mammal
s whose remains had been found in the nearby La Brea Tar Pits
. The following year, Knight began a 28-mural
series for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History
, a project which chronicled the history of life on earth and took four years to complete. At the Field Museum, he produced one of his best-known pieces, a mural featuring Tyrannosaurus
and Triceratops
. This confrontation scene between a predator and its prey would inspire a huge number of imitations, establishing the two dinosaurs as “mortal enemies” in the popular consciousness. The Field Museum’s Alexander Sherman says, “It is so well-loved that it has become the standard encounter for portraying the age of dinosaurs”.
Knight’s work also found its way to the Carnegie Museums
in Pittsburgh
the Smithsonian Institution
, and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, among others. Several zoo
s, such as the Bronx Zoo
, the Lincoln Park Zoo
, and the Brookfield Zoo
, also approached Knight to paint murals of their living animals, and Knight enthusiastically complied. Knight was actually the only person in America allowed to paint Su Lin, a giant panda
that lived at Brookfield Zoo during the 1930s .
While making murals for museums and zoos, Knight continued illustrating books and magazines, and became a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He also wrote and illustrated several books of his own, such as Before the Dawn of History (Knight, 1935), Life Through the Ages (1946), Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists (1947), and Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventure (1949). Additionally, Knight became a popular lecture
r, describing prehistoric life to audiences across the country.
Eventually, Knight began to retire from the public sphere to spend more time with his grandchildren, who shared his passion for animals and prehistoric life. In 1951, he painted his last work, a mural for the Everhart Museum
in Scranton, Pennsylvania
. Two years later, he died peacefully in Manhattan.
Examples of Knight's work frequently appeared in dinosaur books published in the US during the first half of the twentieth century. Many works released since then also include examples of Knight’s paintings; for example, Stephen Jay Gould
used one of Knight’s paintings for the cover of his 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus
and another in his 1996 book Dinosaur in a Haystack
. Though many other paleoartists have succeeded Knight (most notably Zdeněk Burian
) Knight’s paintings still remain very popular among paleontology enthusiasts. A commemorative edition of Knight’s 1946 book Life Through the Ages [ISBN 0-253-33928-6] was recently published by Indiana University Press
, and a 2007 calendar
[ISBN 0-7649-3622-0] of Knight’s paintings is also currently available. Additionally, fantasy artist William Stout
has been compiling a series of Charles Knight Sketchbooks, which contain many rare and previously unpublished drawings and studies
by Knight.
Because Knight worked in an era when new and often fragmentary fossils were coming out of the American west in quantity, not all of his creations were based on solid evidence; dinosaurs such as his improbably-adorned Agathaumas
(1897: left) for example, were somewhat speculative. His depictions of better-known ceratopsians as solitary animals inhabiting lush grassy landscapes were largely imaginative (the grasslands that feature in many of his paintings didn't appear until the Cenozoic
).
Although Knight sometimes made musculoskeletal studies of living animals, he did not do so for his dinosaur restorations, and he restored many dinosaurs with typical reptilian-like limbs and narrow hips (Paul, 1996). In the 1920s, studies by the celebrated palaeontologists Alfred Romer
and Gerhard Heilmann
(Heilmann, 1926) had confirmed that dinosaurs had broad avian-like hips rather than those of a typical reptile. Knight often restored extinct mammals, birds and marine reptiles in very dynamic action poses, but his depictions of large dinosaurs as ponderous swamp-dwellers destined for extinction reflected more traditional concepts (Paul, 1996). In his catalogue to Life through the Ages (1946), he reiterated views that he had written earlier (Knight, 1935), describing the great beasts as "slow-moving dunces" that were "unadaptable and unprogressive" while conceding that small dinosaurs had been more active.
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 always referred to the creature with the former name . Gould writes in his 1989 book Wonderful Life
, “Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day” .
Other admirers have included special effects artist Ray Harryhausen
, who writes in his autobiography An Animated Life, “Long before Obie (Willis O'Brien
), myself, and Steven Spielberg
, he put flesh on creatures that no human had ever seen. […] At the L.A. County Museum I vividly remember a beautiful Knight mural on one of the walls depicting the way the tar pits would have looked in ancient times. This, plus a picture book about Knight’s work my mother gave me, were my first encounters with a man who was to prove an enormous help when the time came for me to make three-dimensional models of these extinct beings” . Paleoartist Gregory S. Paul
has also mentioned Knight as a big influence on him.
An homage to the painter was also made in the IMAX
feature film, T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous
, in which he was portrayed by actor Tuck Milligan.
In addition, a touring exhibit, Honoring the Life of Charles R. Knight, was launched in 2003 and has visited several locations throughout the United States.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
best known for his influential painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
s of dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
s and other prehistoric
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
animals. His works have been reproduced in many books and are currently on display at several major museum
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
s in the United States.
Early life
As a child, Knight was deeply interested in nature and animals, and spent many hours copying the illustrations from his father’s natural historyNatural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
books. Though legally blind
Blindness
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...
because of astigmatism
Astigmatism (eye)
Astigmatism is an optical defect in which vision is blurred due to the inability of the optics of the eye to focus a point object into a sharp focused image on the retina. This may be due to an irregular or toric curvature of the cornea or lens. There are two types of astigmatism: regular and...
and a subsequent injury to his right eye, Knight pursued his artistic talents with the help of specially-designed glasses, and at the age of twelve, he enrolled at the Metropolitan Art School
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
to become a commercial artist
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
. In 1890, he was hired by a church-decorating firm to design stained-glass windows
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
, and after two years with them, became a freelance
Freelancer
A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...
illustrator for books and magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
s, specializing in nature scenes.
In his free time, Knight visited the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, attracting the attention of Dr. Jacob Wortman, who asked Knight to paint a restoration of a prehistoric pig
Pig
A pig is any of the animals in the genus Sus, within the Suidae family of even-toed ungulates. Pigs include the domestic pig, its ancestor the wild boar, and several other wild relatives...
, Elotherium, whose fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
ized bones were on display. Though many artists at the time were reluctant to make such restorations, given the amount of guesswork involved, Knight applied his knowledge of modern pig anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
to make the painting as realistic as possible, and used his imagination to fill in any gaps. Wortman was thrilled with the final result, and the museum soon commissioned Knight to produce an entire series of watercolors to grace their fossil halls. Knight’s work for the museum was not without critics, however: many curators argued that his work was more artistic than scientific, and protested that he did not have sufficient scientific expertise to render prehistoric animals as precisely as he did. While Knight himself agreed with that his murals for the Hall of the Age of Man were “primarily a work of art,” he insisted that he had as much paleontological knowledge as the museum’s own curators. His paintings were hugely popular among visitors, and Knight continued to work with the museum well until the 1930s, painting what would become some of the world’s most celebrated images of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and prehistoric humans.
Dryptosaurus
Dryptosaurus was a genus of primitive tyrannosaur that lived in Eastern North America during the middle Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period. Although largely unknown now outside of academic circles, a famous painting of the genus by Charles R...
, which was one of the few pre-1960s images to present dinosaurs as active, fast-moving creatures (thus anticipating the theories of modern paleontologists like Robert Bakker). Other familiar American Museum paintings include Knight’s portrayals of Agathaumas
Agathaumas
Agathaumas is a dubious genus of a large ceratopsid dinosaur that lived in Wyoming during the Late Cretaceous . The name comes from Greek, αγαν - 'much' and θαυμα - 'wonder'...
, Allosaurus
Allosaurus
Allosaurus is a genus of large theropod dinosaur that lived 155 to 150 million years ago during the late Jurassic period . The name Allosaurus means "different lizard". It is derived from the Greek /allos and /sauros...
, Brontosaurus
Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus , also known by the popular but scientifically deprecated synonym Brontosaurus, is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived from about 154 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period . It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of and a...
, Smilodon
Smilodon
Smilodon , often called a saber-toothed cat or saber-toothed tiger, is an extinct genus of machairodonts. This saber-toothed cat was endemic to North America and South America, living from near the beginning through the very end of the Pleistocene epoch .-Etymology:The nickname "saber-tooth" refers...
, and the Woolly Mammoth
Mammoth
A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair...
. All of these have been reproduced in numerous places and have inspired many imitations.
Nationwide attention
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. Its distinctive main building, with fitted marble walls and domed and...
which portrayed some of the bird
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...
s and mammal
Mammal
Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young...
s whose remains had been found in the nearby La Brea Tar Pits
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in the urban heart of Los Angeles. Asphaltum or tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with water...
. The following year, Knight began a 28-mural
Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...
series for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History
Field Museum of Natural History
The Field Museum of Natural History is located in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It sits on Lake Shore Drive next to Lake Michigan, part of a scenic complex known as the Museum Campus Chicago...
, a project which chronicled the history of life on earth and took four years to complete. At the Field Museum, he produced one of his best-known pieces, a mural featuring Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus meaning "tyrant," and sauros meaning "lizard") is a genus of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur. The species Tyrannosaurus rex , commonly abbreviated to T. rex, is a fixture in popular culture. It lived throughout what is now western North America, with a much wider range than other...
and Triceratops
Triceratops
Triceratops is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsid dinosaur which lived during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period, around 68 to 65 million years ago in what is now North America. It was one of the last dinosaur genera to appear before the great Cretaceous–Paleogene...
. This confrontation scene between a predator and its prey would inspire a huge number of imitations, establishing the two dinosaurs as “mortal enemies” in the popular consciousness. The Field Museum’s Alexander Sherman says, “It is so well-loved that it has become the standard encounter for portraying the age of dinosaurs”.
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh are four museums that are operated by the Carnegie Institute headquartered in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...
in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
, and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, among others. Several zoo
Zoo
A zoological garden, zoological park, menagerie, or zoo is a facility in which animals are confined within enclosures, displayed to the public, and in which they may also be bred....
s, such as the Bronx Zoo
Bronx Zoo
The Bronx Zoo is located in the Bronx borough of New York City, within Bronx Park. It is the largest metropolitan zoo in the United States, comprising of park lands and naturalistic habitats, through which the Bronx River flows....
, the Lincoln Park Zoo
Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park is an urban park in Chicago, which gave its name to the Lincoln Park, Chicago community area.Lincoln Park may also refer to:-Urban parks:*Lincoln Park , California*Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California...
, and the Brookfield Zoo
Brookfield Zoo
The Brookfield Zoo is zoo located in the Chicago suburb of Brookfield, Illinois. The zoo covers an area of and houses around 450 species of animals....
, also approached Knight to paint murals of their living animals, and Knight enthusiastically complied. Knight was actually the only person in America allowed to paint Su Lin, a giant panda
Giant Panda
The giant panda, or panda is a bear native to central-western and south western China. It is easily recognized by its large, distinctive black patches around the eyes, over the ears, and across its round body. Though it belongs to the order Carnivora, the panda's diet is 99% bamboo...
that lived at Brookfield Zoo during the 1930s .
While making murals for museums and zoos, Knight continued illustrating books and magazines, and became a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He also wrote and illustrated several books of his own, such as Before the Dawn of History (Knight, 1935), Life Through the Ages (1946), Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists (1947), and Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventure (1949). Additionally, Knight became a popular lecture
Lecture
thumb|A lecture on [[linear algebra]] at the [[Helsinki University of Technology]]A lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history,...
r, describing prehistoric life to audiences across the country.
Eventually, Knight began to retire from the public sphere to spend more time with his grandchildren, who shared his passion for animals and prehistoric life. In 1951, he painted his last work, a mural for the Everhart Museum
Everhart Museum
The Everhart Museum is a non-profit art and natural history museum located in Nay Aug Park in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1908 by Dr. Isaiah Fawkes Everhart, a local medical doctor and skilled taxidermist. Many of the specimens in the museum's extensive ornithological collection came...
in Scranton, Pennsylvania
Scranton, Pennsylvania
Scranton is a city in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, United States. It is the county seat of Lackawanna County and the largest principal city in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area. Scranton had a population of 76,089 in 2010, according to the U.S...
. Two years later, he died peacefully in Manhattan.
Legacy
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
used one of Knight’s paintings for the cover of his 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus
Bully for Brontosaurus
Bully for Brontosaurus is the fifth volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years...
and another in his 1996 book Dinosaur in a Haystack
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Dinosaur in a Haystack is the seventh volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column "The View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years...
. Though many other paleoartists have succeeded Knight (most notably Zdeněk Burian
Zdenek Burian
Zdeněk Michael František Burian was a Czech painter and book illustrator whose work played a central role in the development of palaeontological reconstructions during a remarkable career spanning five decades...
) Knight’s paintings still remain very popular among paleontology enthusiasts. A commemorative edition of Knight’s 1946 book Life Through the Ages [ISBN 0-253-33928-6] was recently published by Indiana University Press
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
, and a 2007 calendar
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not...
[ISBN 0-7649-3622-0] of Knight’s paintings is also currently available. Additionally, fantasy artist William Stout
William Stout
William Stout is an American fantasy artist and illustrator with a specialization in paleontological art. His paintings have been shown in over seventy exhibitions, including twelve one-man shows. He has worked on over thirty feature films, doing everything from storyboard art to production design...
has been compiling a series of Charles Knight Sketchbooks, which contain many rare and previously unpublished drawings and studies
Study (drawing)
In art, a study is a drawing, sketch or painting done in preparation for a finished piece, or as visual notes. A study can have more impact than a more-elaborately planned work, due to the fresh insights the artist is gaining while exploring his/her subject. The excitement of discovery can give a...
by Knight.
Agathaumas
Agathaumas is a dubious genus of a large ceratopsid dinosaur that lived in Wyoming during the Late Cretaceous . The name comes from Greek, αγαν - 'much' and θαυμα - 'wonder'...
(1897: left) for example, were somewhat speculative. His depictions of better-known ceratopsians as solitary animals inhabiting lush grassy landscapes were largely imaginative (the grasslands that feature in many of his paintings didn't appear until the Cenozoic
Cenozoic
The Cenozoic era is the current and most recent of the three Phanerozoic geological eras and covers the period from 65.5 mya to the present. The era began in the wake of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous that saw the demise of the last non-avian dinosaurs and...
).
Although Knight sometimes made musculoskeletal studies of living animals, he did not do so for his dinosaur restorations, and he restored many dinosaurs with typical reptilian-like limbs and narrow hips (Paul, 1996). In the 1920s, studies by the celebrated palaeontologists Alfred Romer
Alfred Romer
Alfred Sherwood Romer was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist and a specialist in vertebrate evolution.-Biography:...
and Gerhard Heilmann
Gerhard Heilmann
Gerhard Heilmann was a Danish artist and paleontologist who created artistic depictions of Archeopteryx, Proavis and other early bird relatives apart from writing The Origin of Birds, a pioneering and influential account of bird evolution...
(Heilmann, 1926) had confirmed that dinosaurs had broad avian-like hips rather than those of a typical reptile. Knight often restored extinct mammals, birds and marine reptiles in very dynamic action poses, but his depictions of large dinosaurs as ponderous swamp-dwellers destined for extinction reflected more traditional concepts (Paul, 1996). In his catalogue to Life through the Ages (1946), he reiterated views that he had written earlier (Knight, 1935), describing the great beasts as "slow-moving dunces" that were "unadaptable and unprogressive" while conceding that small dinosaurs had been more active.
The late Stephen Jay Gould was one of Knight’s most well-known fans, notably refusing to refer to Brontosaurus as “Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus
Apatosaurus , also known by the popular but scientifically deprecated synonym Brontosaurus, is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived from about 154 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period . It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of and a...
” because Knight had always referred to the creature with the former name . Gould writes in his 1989 book Wonderful Life
Wonderful Life
Wonderful Life may refer to:*Wonderful Life ,a 1989 book on evolution by Stephen Jay Gould- Film and television :*Wonderful Life , 1964 film starring Cliff Richard...
, “Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day” .
Other admirers have included special effects artist Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen is an American film producer and special effects creator...
, who writes in his autobiography An Animated Life, “Long before Obie (Willis O'Brien
Willis O'Brien
Willis Harold O'Brien was an Irish American pioneering motion picture special effects artist who perfected and specialized in stop-motion animation. He was affectionately known to his family and close friends as "Obie"....
), myself, and Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
, he put flesh on creatures that no human had ever seen. […] At the L.A. County Museum I vividly remember a beautiful Knight mural on one of the walls depicting the way the tar pits would have looked in ancient times. This, plus a picture book about Knight’s work my mother gave me, were my first encounters with a man who was to prove an enormous help when the time came for me to make three-dimensional models of these extinct beings” . Paleoartist Gregory S. Paul
Gregory S. Paul
Gregory Scott Paul is a freelance researcher, author and illustrator who works in paleontology, and more recently has examined sociology and theology. He is best known for his work and research on theropod dinosaurs and his detailed illustrations, both live and skeletal...
has also mentioned Knight as a big influence on him.
An homage to the painter was also made in the IMAX
IMAX
IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of proprietary cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...
feature film, T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous is a 1998 edu-tainment feature filmed for the IMAX 3D format. The film is directed by Brett Leonard, renowned for his Computer-generated imagery special effects productions. Executive producer/co-writer Andrew Gellis and producers Antoine Compin and Charis Horton also...
, in which he was portrayed by actor Tuck Milligan.
Works
Knight’s works are currently included as part of the permanent collections of these colleges, libraries, museums, and zoos:- Academy of Natural SciencesAcademy of Natural SciencesThe Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the New World...
(Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
) - American Museum of Natural HistoryAmerican Museum of Natural HistoryThe American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
(New York, New York) - Bethune-Cookman CollegeBethune-Cookman CollegeBethune-Cookman University or B-CU is a private historically black university in Daytona Beach, Florida.- History :Mary McLeod Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School in 1904...
(Daytona Beach, FloridaDaytona Beach, FloridaDaytona Beach is a city in Volusia County, Florida, USA. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the city has a population of 64,211. Daytona Beach is a principal city of the Deltona – Daytona Beach – Ormond Beach, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area, which the census bureau estimated had...
) - Bronx ZooBronx ZooThe Bronx Zoo is located in the Bronx borough of New York City, within Bronx Park. It is the largest metropolitan zoo in the United States, comprising of park lands and naturalistic habitats, through which the Bronx River flows....
(Bronx, New York) - Carnegie Museum of Natural HistoryCarnegie Museum of Natural HistoryCarnegie Museum of Natural History, located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, was founded by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896...
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In addition, a touring exhibit, Honoring the Life of Charles R. Knight, was launched in 2003 and has visited several locations throughout the United States.
External links and references
- The World of Charles Knight, a website maintained by Knight’s granddaughter Rhoda Knight Kalt (includes most of his paintings)
- Charles R. Knight biography at Field Museum website
- Charles R. Knight biography at American Museum of Natural History website
- Interview with Rhoda Knight Kalt at Geospectrum (newsletter of the American Geological Institute)
- Heilmann, G. (1926). The Origin of BirdsThe Origin of Birds (book)The Origin of Birds is an early synopsis of bird evolution written in 1926 by Gerhard Heilmann, a Danish artist and amateur zoologist. The book was born from a series of articles published between 1913 and 1916 in Danish, and although republished as a book it received mainly criticism from...
. London, H.F. & G. Witherby. - Knight, C.R. (1935). Before the Dawn of History. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company.
- Paul, G.S. (1996). The art of Charles R. Knight. Scientific American 274 (6): 74-81.
- Cain, V. (2010) “‘The Direct Medium of the Vision’: Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing and the Prehistoric Past at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1923.” Journal of Visual Culture, 9: 284, pp. 284-303.