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INTRODUCTION
Pictures of animals drawn on bone are among the first records of man's art work. The artist probably used these pictured animals to tell the absent neighbor where he had gone and for what purpose. Some of the drawings are exceedingly life-like–one of an elephant gives us an excellent idea of that pachyderm in prehistoric times. So you see the making of animal pictures is an inherited instinct in artists. And this instinct for drawing animals expresses itself most truthfully in the earliest art of every country. A certain spontaneity is necessary to portray a real animal. The early artist felt this instinctively and the great masters of art knew it through training. Compare the animals outlined in stone on Ti's Tomb in Egypt (see page 20), and Rembrandt's Elephant (see page 104) outlined in charcoal–one expresses the spontaneous artistic instinct, the other the result of intensified mental and manual training and both have given real, alive animals.
The fundamental attributes of great animal pictures are simplicity and truthfulness; and the combination of these attributes makes for famous pictures of real animals in paint and stone.
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