The Vision of Charles Knight

The dramatic, large scale paintings in Chicago's Field Museum have always intrigued me. So many of the pieces looked like they are created by the same artist, but they range from landscapes to mammals to dinosaurs and some are absolutely massive in size. I finally started doing my research (including locating the wall-mounted identification plates near each piece) and found that my suspicions were correct - several of the pieces at the field were created by an artists named Charles R. Knight. Knight was an  American natural life artist who used his passion for nature and biology, a sharp eye for detail and a stellar imagination to create drawings and paintings of prehistoric creatures.

Knight's Elotherium at AMNH

Born in 1874 in Brooklyn, Knight could be found recording images from nature in his journal at an early age. Although legally blind (due to a severe astigmatism and a boyhood eye injury), Knight saw with the help of specialty eye-glasses, but often worked only inches from his canvas. As a young man in New York, he attended art school, and in the 1890's was commissioned to complete a restoration of the extinct pig Elotherium from a set of fossil bones for the American Museum of Natural History (right).  The folks at AMNH were impressed and soon Knight was creating depictions of extinct beasts (including human ancestors) for museums around the country.

It was in 1926 when Knight was asked to paint the 28 mural series that graces the walls of my beloved Field museum chronicling the history of life on Earth. Although the artist of many landscapes and prehistoric mammals, many of his pieces are famed for depicting Dinosaurs as active and fast-moving animals - many years ahead of this method of thinking among paleontologists. Knight's depictions were often based on basic biology, fossils and a lot of imagination, so some of his beasts turned out not to be entirely historically accurate. The accuracy of his 1897 depiction of Brontosauruses (Brontosauri?) was later debunked when Brontosaurus was found to have been land dwelling (Knight depicted the animals in water) and also not tail dragging. Considering the first complete dinosaur skeleton in the United States (Hadrosaurus Foulkii) had only been discovered in 1858, most of Knight's depictions were far ahead of his time.

One of those helpful informational plaques at 

Field.

The world lost Knight in 1953, but his legacy continues to grow. Earlier this year, Scientific American published a piece called Time Traveler: The Art of Charles Knight in advance of Richard Milner's new book, "Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time" which was released by Abrams in March. Quickly following the article SA posted a slide show of Knights work (here).

Want to learn more? On the Field's multimedia site you can find a collection of all of their Knight pieces. You can also find a compilation of his work for the American Museum of Natural history here. Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracker Blog has a great piece here about the more personal side of Knight's career and creativity by the excellent Brian Switek.

Although old-school paintings of dinosaurs might not seem as impressive as the CGI we have today, we have to remember that Knight was working in the later half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. During this time, understanding of dinosaurs was limited, fossil hunting was still a bit like the wild west, and the true study of dinosaur behavior and habitat had barely begun. Knight's work was akin to a Ray Bradbury novel - exploring a far-flung locale, describing worlds in which no man had ever walked. The world of the dinosaurs was as foreign as the Martian landscape and the vision of Charles Knight helped bring this unbelievable world to life, and continues to do so for museum-goers today.

Source: http://www.charlesrknight.com/