Charles R. Knight

(1874 – 1953) 

Natural History Artist – The Father of Paleo Art

Throughout his youth in New York City, Charles Knight was fascinated by wildlife and the natural world, spending hours copying illustrations from books.  Although he was legally blind from astigmatism and an eye injury, he was able to continue his artistic pursuits with the aid of special glasses.  Knight attended art school at the Froebel Academy, Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute, and the art school of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later became a freelance illustrator, specializing in nature subjects.

As he frequented the American Museum of Natural History in the 1890’s, Knight was eventually asked to paint a restoration of a prehistoric pig for Dr. Jacob Wortman.  His knowledge of anatomy, visual reference to fossils, and artistic imagination enabled Knight to create beautiful restorations of prehistoric creatures, and the museum commissioned him to produce a series of paintings that kept him busy for decades.  His depictions of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals and early humans became a highlight of the museum and some of the most recognizable and famous images world-wide.

Knight’s fame grew quickly, and he was hired by several museums throughout the country to produce murals to accent their fossil exhibits.  In 1925, he painted the now-famous mural of Pleistocene creatures of the La Brea Tar Pits.  From 1926 through 1930, Knight created a series of 28 murals chronicling the history of life on earth for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.  Other museums that display Charles Knight’s artwork include the Smithsonian Institution, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, and Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.  Knight also painted murals of living animals for the Bronx Zoo, the National Zoo, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Brookfield Zoo.

Besides painting murals for museums and zoos, Knight continued his illustration work for magazines and books.  He was a frequent contributor to National Geographic magazine over the years.  Knight wrote and illustrated his own books, Before the Dawn of History (1935), Life Through The Ages (1946), Animal Drawing: Anatomy & Action for Artists (1947), and Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventure (1949). 

The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons.  Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day”.