Creature Comfort: Animal Art in the Home

Deities in the art of ancient religions were often imagined as mythological creatures sometimes merging animal and human anatomies. Hindu gods and goddesses all have their animal counterparts. The elephant-headed Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles, is perhaps the most widely recognized deity outside of India.  

Cats were ubiquitous in ancient Egypt revered as sacred household companions in life and mummified to travel with their human owners after death.

Indigenous cultures acknowledge their dependence on animals for daily survival by incorporating their images in artworks and everyday items like this beautifully crafted Eskimo basket topped with an ivory polar bear and seal handle.

Cultural depictions of dogs in art, usually in the context of hunting, are found in caves and tombs going back to the Bronze Age. As they became domesticated dogs, were brought into the home, as seen in this Pompeiian fresco Endymion and Selene. Dogs have continued to be featured in painting and sculpture throughout art history, becoming a status symbol in the 18th and 19th century.

As long as life itself, our evolution as a species has been intimately dependent on our nonhuman counterparts and we have honored that reciprocal relationship by incorporating animal imagery in art, icons, and everyday objects used in our domestic environments. In the early 20th century Dadaist Marcel Duchamp coined the term readymade, turning found objects into art. In 1942, Picasso put a twist on this concept when he turned a discarded bicycle seat into a bull’s head.

Japanese sculptor Sayaka Ganz takes household waste, discarded items from thrift stores and turns them into animal forms. Ganz’s current focus is plastics. Motion is her hallmark. Her Shinto animist belief imbues inanimate utensils, forks, knives, and spatulas, with new life. Sculptures of birds, cats, fish, and horses are positioned swimming, swirling, flying, and running elegantly in space.

Creature Comfort: Animals in the House (February 1 - August 23, 2020) at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum explores our historical bonds with animals through the art we make and the objects we live with. Shelburne Chief Curator Kory Rogers has created a cozy, thematically arranged showcase taping into the museum's own extensive collection of art and household artifacts complemented by objects from private collections to highlight the cultural, emotional, aesthetic, and practical bonds between humans and animals.

Upon entering the gallery, we are greeted by a warmly lit mantel flanked by two framed late 18th century Delft tiles, one a cat, the other a dog, suggesting we have just entered an inviting home where both cats and dogs are welcomed by the fireside. A series of black and white photos from the life of Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), the museum's founder, show her surrounded by and sometimes covered by her bevy of dogs, most often poodles, indicating that although she died in 1960, she would have enthusiastically supported this exhibition.

Creature Comfort is organized into six animal-themed, color-coordinated areas suggesting rooms in a home. The paintings, rugs, ceramics, toys, cages, wallpaper and furniture featuring dogs, birds, fish, cryptids (myths and monsters), wildlife, and cats generally date from the 18th century to the present. In challenging our notion of domesticated animal imagery, Rogers has chosen objects that take giant aesthetic leaps.

A gracefully sculptural pair of porcelain Mute Swan Tureens, ca. 1755 (the only known surviving set) stand in sharp contrast to Pair of Guard Beasts: Brooke Shields and Jean Luc-Pi-guard (2016) a surrealist inflected anthropomorphic set of chairs by the Los Angeles-based Haas Brothers known for their irreverent designs straddling functionality and purely inventive form.

It is estimated that over 85 million households in the United States currently include at least one animal as a pet with worldwide statistics even higher and growing. We pay tribute to those creatures in our lives with photographs, paintings, sculptures, poetry, and song. And while human activity drives ever more species into extinction, their images, caught in art and objects may be all that remains.