An Enormous Scale Mid 19th Century Naive Character Painting of a Double Humped Camel

Painted on loose grained linen, stretched on a timber frame. Based on the depiction of the Bactrian camel, possibly in the circle of the Austrian painter Aloys Zötl, as depicted in part of his Bestiarium. 

From 1831 until his death in 1887, the obscure Austrian dyer and amateur artist Aloys Zötl produced an extensive series of very large and beautifully drawn watercolours of exotic animals, known as the ‘Bestiarium’. This massive project was to be his life’s work, although its purpose remains mystical and unknown. The watercolours of the Bestiarium, characterised by a brilliant technique and rich colouring, and allied to the unbridled imagination of the artist, were ‘re-discovered’ decades after his death by surrealist writer and poet André Breton, who was taken by the whimsical and strange aesthetic he saw present in the images. While the animals are generally depicted with a high degree of accuracy, they are given a sort of added symbolism in the way in which the artist has depicted them on the page – mostly showing the animals in some form of natural habitat, although this at times seems to verge on the imaginary and illusory. It is not known if these spectacular watercolours were the result of a commission or – as is perhaps most likely, given the fact that they were part of a project that seems to have lasted over fifty years – simply an astonishing, and lifelong, labour of love.

Further reading; (Aloys Zötl in Surrealism and Painting, 1956)

Width: 230cm, 7 foot 6″
Height: 170cm, 5 foot 6 1/2″