The 18th-century “kongouro” painted by George Stubbs will feature in an exhibition of animals depicted by artists who never saw their subjects in the flesh.
The pictures will also include an armour-plated rhinoceros, an elephant carrying the population of a small village on its back and a double-jointed lion, bottom.
“These images are important not for any scientific reason, obviously, but because they show how people thought of these fabulous animals,” Jack Ashby, manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology in London, told the Guardian.
The museum is borrowing and building an exhibition, Strange Creatures, around Stubbs’s kangaroo. The painting has been owned by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich since 2013. “Often it didn’t matter to people what the animals really looked like. They were seen as emblems of qualities such as strength and courage,” Mr Ashby said.
Stubbs painted The Kongouro From New Holland in 1772, with a matching image of a dingo. They were the first depictions of Australian animals in western art. It is thought that the skin of a kangaroo was brought back from Captain Cook’s first voyage on the Endeavour and inflated like a balloon for him to draw. The artist had only a vague eye witness account for the dingo.
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Strange Creatures runs from March 16 to June 27, 2015.