The appreciation of art is a highly subjective matter. A work of art that some people revere and love will have little appeal to others and that has always been the case.
It is reflected in the divide between figurative and abstract art, with many of those who love the former being able to find no value in the latter. Equally, within the realm of figurative paintings, different works of art provoke wildly differing interpretations and responses.

One popular subject for figurative painters is animals. Given our passion for them, there is nothing very surprising about that, but the most famous animal paintings have often met with mixed reactions.

These are some examples.

1. Whistlejacket
The self-trained 18th century English artist George Stubbs is renowned for his paintings of horses. One of the most famous of them is Whistlejacket, which depicts an Arabian thoroughbred mare that was owned by the Marquess of Rockingham.

The exact date of its creation is uncertain, but it is believed to date from roughly 1762 and one of the things that made it a sensation at the time was its scale. It depicts the beautiful brown horse at close to life size and set against an austere background with only some shadowing.

That makes it impossible to tell where the horse is meant to be, which separates it from other equine works by Stubbs. Now hanging in London’s National Gallery, it owes little to other painters, which is true of most works by this particular artist.

2. The Poker Game
This oddity is the work of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge and was created in 1894. As with Stubbs, Coolidge is a man who focused on one particular animal – in his case dogs – but he depicted them in entirely different fashion.

His stock-in-trade was playful paintings of these animals engaged in typically human activities and The Poker Game was the first dogs playing poker painting in what became a lengthy series. It was followed by pieces like Poker Sympathy, A Friend in Need, Pinched with Four Aces and A Bold Bluff (all from 1903), plus Waterloo in 1906.

Coolidge is believed to taken inspiration from an earlier painting of dogs taking on human roles within a court called Trial by Jury. However he made important changes.
In addition to replacing the serious tone of that painting with a more whimsical one he also anthropomorphized the dogs to a greater extent – with drinks and cigars being consumed and smoked by the canine gamblers.



3. Napoleon Crossing the Alps
Painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1801, this is a patriotic work that shows the Emperor of France travelling on horseback over the Alps the year before. It is seen as being a key work in changing how Napoleon was portrayed by artists.

Up until this painting, Bonaparte had mostly been shown in realistic fashion, but this portrait actively seeks to present him as a more idealized, mythological figure.

Both he and his white war horse Marengo are presented as glorious figures, but oddly, it was a rare portrait created within Napoleon’s direct involvement. His son served as the artist’s model in his place, because Napoleon himself was too busy to pose.

4. The Steer
This work by Franz Marc is a more modern piece, dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Marc was part of the artistic movement Expressionism and this is a landmark work from that movement.

It stands out because the subject matter of a white bull was not a standard choice for Marc. He was just as much known for his paintings of women and wheat as for animal art.

Like other works of Expressionism, The Steer depicts its subject and background setting in very bold, blockish color and blurs the lines slightly between figurative and abstract art.

Up close, The Steer could be mistaken for an abstract piece. It is only when viewed from greater distance that the forms become absolutely clear.

Marc would later be influenced by the cubism of Picasso and produce works such as Tiger that moved further into quasi-abstract breakdowns of their subject matter.



5. Victory or Defeat
This painting by renowned Chinese artist Hu Zaobin shows that the depiction of animals in art is certainly not just a western thing. Zaobin clearly loved tigers as they are central to the body of work that he produced before his early death at 46 in 1942.

Victory or Defeat is one of the most iconic though and is currently housed in the Macau Museum of Art. It depicts a rather strange scene in which a tiger is engaged in battle with a peacock and shows the tiger at its strongest and most majestic.

Much of the inspiration for his work came not from other artists but from travel through Southeast Asia, where he photographed tigers at rest and in action. Those photographs served him throughout much of the rest of his brief artistic career.

Zaobin is an animal artist who deserves to be better known among western art lovers as his tigers are captured in extraordinary levels of detail and feature a real sense of life and movement.

These are just some of the many paintings of animals that artists from around the world have created over the centuries. From witty to serene and serious, they are depicted in different ways and inspire different reactions.