Drawing on the Agnes’s rich collection of European works on paper, this exhibition shows the wide variety of animals–from dogs to dragonflies–that emerged in the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Artists studied their characteristics and evoked their behaviour, but the contexts and settings they chose, from barnyards to legends and fables, reveal how they saw the place of animals within the natural order as below human beings and often existing for their use.

Nina Schroeder

This exhibition was curated by Nina Schroeder under the supervision of Bader Curator of European Art David de Witt as part of a practicum course in the graduate program of the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University.