Traces of the living.

In 1830, English scientist Henry De la Beche painted the first work of paleoart: a dazzling and delightfully macabre vision of prehistoric reptiles fighting underwater. Since then, artists around the world have brought dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, cavemen, and other creatures to life, helping to shape our understanding of the antediluvian past.

In this groundbreaking book, author Zoë Lescaze and artist Walton Ford offer an astonishing history of paleoart from 1830 to 1990. Not the history of cave paintings made thousands of years ago, but the history of modern representations of prehistory: paintings, engravings, drawings, sculptures, mosaics and frescoes that mix scientific data and unbridled imagination. The collection explores in depth this neglected area of art history and shows how artists wishing to represent these extinct creatures projected their own aesthetic whims onto prehistory, tinting this primitive past with Romanticism, Impressionism, Japonism, Fauvism or Art Nouveau.

Accompanied by Lescaze's rigorous texts and a preface by Ford, with its four fold-out pages and dozens of details, the book exhibits a dizzying selection of works drawn from important natural history museums, obscure archives, and private collections, with new reproductions of key works of the genre, such as the dinosaur depictions of the precursor Charles R. Knight, preserved in Chicago, as well as little-known masterpieces such as A.M. Belashov's monumental mosaic in Moscow. From the most menacing to the most fantastical, Paleoart. Visions of Prehistoric Times is a tribute to prehistoric animals in art, and a great opportunity to understand these much-loved extinct wild beasts through a new prism, that of art history.

292 pages

Éditions Taschen