ART: Haven't You Always Wanted a Monkey?

In my early twenties, I spent three years working in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in southeastern Ontario -- a town that is, believe it or not, even more twee than its name suggests. You can't throw a rock in Niagara-on-the-Lake without hitting some reference to the War of 1812, so it makes perfect sense that the town has -- in a spirit one can only describe as exhaustive -- decided to embrace history in all its permutations, even history that is not its own.

The town is chockablock (there's that word again!) with antiques and faux-historical bric-a-brac. If you were to go looking for that rock you were hurling around so cavalierly back in the first paragraph and then huck it again, you couldn't avoid hitting lots (and lots and lots) of 18th-century (or 18th-century-esque) scientific illustrations of plants and flowers and birds and butterflies. Pretty pictures, yes, but not the kind of stuff you want to hang on your own walls.

On the other hand, if those shops had stocked prints like THIS, I would have put them directly in touch with my decorator:


Look at that mug. Don't let those six-inch talons fool you. All this little buddy wants from you is a great big HUG.

There are many more of these kinds of engravings to be seen over at BibliOdyssey (including a mole-like creature who charms me more than a little), along with a more informed write-up than I can provide, including this little tidbit:

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.

Thankful, indeed. Check it out.

[via boingboing]