The following 2 artworks aren't from the Crystal Palace but I wanted to show them anyway.
"When the Palace transferred to Penge in 1854, Joseph Paxton was determined to make it an unrivalled attraction.As part of this plan "dinosaur islands" were created in the park lakes upon which huge models of the long extinct creatures were constructed, many only recently discovered and of great topical interest.
Sculptured by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, models of extinct mammals as well as dinosaurs were included." - quote source.
This page has a fantastic array of artwork related to the dinosaurs from the Crystal palace.
There's a great collection of articles concerning the early discoveries of dinosaur species here. The first chapater discusses the Crystal Castle dinosaurs here and here.
To see a photos of the actual dinosaur sculptures, click here.
Read more about this attraction here.
And here is one more illustration of prehistoric monsters by one of my favorite artists, John Martin. This is a mezzotint with the description, "A nocturnal scene with saurians and sea-creatures fighting each other in the water."
4 comments:
There are six good engravings from "The World Before the Deluge" by Louis Figuier at www.copyrightexpired.com Paul.
Thanks for the link, I'm holding back on posting much more Dino stuff right now as I want to do a giant week, possibly two week long post on it later this year. But here's a link with some really great dinosaur drawings - http://www.dinosaur-world.com/
Also, one of the most terrifying yet fascinating things about dinosaurs, they almost always blow away any monster that's been painted, sculpted or drawn, and those sons of bitches really existed! You become desensitized over your life to the fact that things this bizarre and gigantic really existed at one time. But when you stop to think about it, it seems to make reality a little less mundane.
I really like that John Martin print - have you noticed that it is possible to divide it into details that work well as three seperate pictures, the fighting monsters, the dead one and also the background with the arch of the sea monster and the moon, each picture would have a different atmosphere....
Paul
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