{"title":"Reptiles","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"barrett-peter-british-b-1935","title":"BARRETT, Peter (British, b. 1935). Common Chameleon.","description":"\u003cp\u003ePeter Barrett (British, b. 1935)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eCommon Chameleon\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003eca. 1990\u003cbr\u003eWatercolor on paper\u003cbr\u003e7 3\/8\" x 7 3\/8\" framed\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePeter Barrett produced numerous illustrations and paintings for famous animal centric stories and books by Gerald Durrell, Desmond Morris and James Herriot. He also illustrated a number of books under the highly popular Little Golden Books label for children. In 1979 he designed and provided the artwork for a set of United Kingdom postage stamps depicting dogs, for which a commemorative first day cover was issued. He has also illustrated the 1987 Random House edition of the children's classic, The Wind in the Willows. In 1982 his illustrations for Birdwatcher's Diary, by Roger Lovegrove drew critical acclaim. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his compendious illustration of ‘Evolution, the Story of Life’, by Douglas Palmer.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHe is a graphic designer, illustrator and author. His career as an illustrator took off after writing and illustrating a three book series for very young children, along with his wife Susan. Published by Ward Lock, the books (The circle Sara drew, The square Ben drew, The line Sophie drew) became very popular. In the1970s and early 1980s Peter teamed up with Franklin Porcelain. Among his crafted and painted products were a set of thimbles decorated with images of birds, a set of 12 plates with images of the twelve months in the countryside, a set of plates with depictions of animals, and figurines of birds placed upon a porcelain bell.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Arader Galleries","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45109964111916,"sku":null,"price":500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1156\/7956\/files\/Barrett_Animals-3.jpg?v=1765232224"},{"product_id":"van-royen-willem-frederiksz-dutch-1645-1723-three-lizards-in-a-landscape-a-red-headed-agama-with-a-pair-of-sand-lizards","title":"VAN ROYEN, Willem Frederiksz (Dutch 1645-1723), Three Lizards in a Landscape: a Red-headed Agama with a Pair of Sand Lizards","description":"\u003cp\u003eVAN ROYEN, Willem Frederiksz (Dutch 1645-1723).\u003cbr\u003eThree Lizards in a Landscape: a Red-headed Agama with a Pair of Sand Lizards.\u003cbr\u003eWatercolor and gouache over black chalk and graphite, with pen and brown and gray ink, on laid paper; the three lizards executed separately, cut out along their contours, and laid down onto the completed landscape sheet.\u003cbr\u003eLaid down on an eighteenth-century decorated collector’s mount of blue-gray paper with washed borders and black and gilt ruled fillets, inscribed in a shaped cartouche below the image: Van W. F. Royen.\u003cbr\u003e16\" x 10 3\/8\" sheet, Mount: 19 5\/8\" x 13 3\/8\" mount.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThree lizards climb a sunlit bank. The uppermost animal, with a brick-red head, a dark, densely pale-speckled body, a pale ventrolateral stripe, and a long tail with alternating light and dark bands, appears to be the red-headed rock agama, Agama agama (Linnaeus, 1758). In this species, a territorial male in display carries an orange-to-scarlet head above a dark blue-black body flecked with pale spots, while females, juveniles, and subordinate males remain uniformly olive-brown. The body here reads as a dark olive rather than blue, but seventeenth-century blues are notoriously fugitive, and indigo or smalt laid over a dark ground will shift toward olive and gray over three centuries. We might also assume the artist drew from a skin that may have lost some of its color.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAgama agama is native to sub-Saharan Africa, distributed from Mauritania and Senegal eastward across the Sahel to Chad and Kenya and south to Angola, with introduced populations elsewhere. It is a rock-dwelling, conspicuously diurnal animal, and one of the most frequently encountered lizards on the West African coast. In 1682 Elector Frederick William chartered the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische Compagnie (Brandenburg African Company), and on January 1, 1683, the colony of Groß Friedrichsburg was founded on the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana. For roughly four decades thereafter, Brandenburg vessels moved between the Gulf of Guinea and the Baltic. A court painter in Berlin in these years had access, at least in principle, to West African naturalia arriving through that traffic and entering the court Kunstkammer. It is the most reasonable explanation for the presence of a Gold Coast lizard in a Brandenburg studio.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe middle animal is a sand lizard, Lacerta agilis Linnaeus, 1758, shown as an adult male in breeding condition. Identified by the characteristic vivid green flanks and sides of the head, a brown vertebral band carrying dark, pale-centered ocelli, a stocky body with a short and rather blunt head, and a tail well over half the total length. The green appears only in spring, when it serves as a badge of status in contests between males, making this a seasonally specific observation rather than a generic one. The species ranges across temperate Eurasia from the Pyrenees to Mongolia and northwestern China and is abundant in exactly the habitat of Brandenburg: dry sandy heath, open pine woodland, and grassy embankments.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe brown-gray figure at the bottom shows paired rows of bold dark blotches flanking a lighter vertebral band and pale dorsolateral stripes; it may be the female of the same species, Lacerta agilis, whose cryptic brown coloring and crisper longitudinal striping distinguish her from the male above.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRead together, the sheet becomes a study of sexual dimorphism with two lizards from the sandy heaths outside the artist’s own door beside one carried home from the Gulf of Guinea. That juxtaposition of the local and the imported is the Kunstkammer's organizing logic.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVan Royen’s court work included large animal and landscape pictures for various residences, including the Menagerie des Kurfürsten Friedrich III. von Brandenburg (Menagerie of Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg) and Zwergsäger auf der Havel bei Caputh (Smew on the Havel near Caputh) survive in situ at Schloss Caputh. A movable study of this kind would serve very naturally to place small creatures in the foreground of a wall panel or architectural element.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWillem Frederiksz. van Royen was probably born in Haarlem around 1645 and trained with Arnold van Ravesteyn, either there or in The Hague, between 1661 and 1668. He moved to Berlin in 1669 and succeeded the flower painter Adriaen van der Spelt as court painter to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, when van der Spelt returned to the Netherlands. He was in Potsdam in 1689 and, in 1695, was among the founders of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, an institution with which he remained associated until his death there in 1723. He also worked in Amsterdam, contributing paintings to the celebrated cabinet house of Petronella de la Court, now in the Rijksmuseum, alongside Nicolaas Piemont and Johannes Voorhout.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"aradernyc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46328510283820,"sku":null,"price":24000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1156\/7956\/files\/43.jpg?v=1791083249"}],"url":"https:\/\/aradernyc.com\/collections\/reptiles.oembed","provider":"Arader Galleries","version":"1.0","type":"link"}