It was Joseph Pallenberg's fascination with animals that led him to become a sculptor. From a young age, he collected animal specimens, both live and dead, for his own personal study; stories have been passed down about Pallenberg even using his unfortunate mother's laundry tub to boil animal meat off the bone in order to obtain skeletons for reconstruction. Sculpting was a natural outgrowth from his collecting and research habits that began with creating plaster casts of skulls and other remains. When Pallenberg was about eighteen years old, around 1899, he began classes in drawing and sculpture at the Dusseldorf Akademie, having settled in the city of Dusseldorf. Little information survives regarding his school years, though Pallenberg apparently finished his formal education by 1904. After this time, he traveled extensively throughout Germany, visiting the zoological gardens in major cities such as Berlin and Hamburg, where he sketched and even photographed animals to translate into sculpture. Pallenberg preferred to focus on large mammals such as deer and elk for his subject matter. One of his first artistic successes came in 1907, when his life-size Bugling Stag won a gold medal at the German National Art Exhibition. Dusseldorf, the exhibition's host city, bought the sculpture, placing it on permanent display in 1908. 1909 brought a reported visit to New York, and at about this time, Pallenberg also began building his own private zoo at home in Dusseldorf. Throughout the later years of his life and career, Pallenberg continued to create sculpture and exhibit. The scientific community valued his work because he painstakingly strived to sculpt true-to-life images. In fact, Pallenberg's sculpture of the once-endangered "David's deer" species helped raise awareness throughout the zoological world of the need to rescue these creatures from the brink of extinction. Because of his knowledge about animals in captivity, Pallenberg was also commissioned to design actual enclosures at several zoos, just as he was asked to create decoration for others of these institutions; zoos in Detroit, Michigan and Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, consulted Pallenberg about creating "free-range" compounds on their grounds. Unfortunately, much of Pallenberg's original sculpture is only known today through photographs, sketches, and casts, as it was widely destroyed in World War II, and the artist himself died shortly thereafter. Because of this destruction, Pallenberg's fame as a significant animalier sculptor has been largely forgotten, as well. Very little literature has been dedicated to his work, especially in English language editions, although a significant amount of his personal working materials are currently under the care of Dusseldorf's Loebbecke Museum in an archival and research collection.

Raised by his mother and grandparents, Tom Palmore was born in Ada, Oklahoma in 1945. In 1969, he graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Palmore is best known for his animal portraits that often contain a note of whimsy. He approaches his portraits as paintings that are being commissioned by the animal being depicted. Palmore pays close attention to detail when rendering the animal and the character of the subject is revealed through the background, posture, and objects. Individualizing the animal in this manner promotes a very human connection between the animal depicted and the viewer.

Agnes Miller Parker was born in 1895 in Ayrshire, Scotland, and was educated at the Glasgow School of Art. She dedicated her career to book illustration and printmaking, becoming one of Great Britain's foremost wood engravers. Although she was extremely prolific, little information about her personal life and accomplishments has been remembered into contemporary time.

Parker married a fellow student from Glasgow, William McCance (Scottish, 1894-1970), in 1918. Following this, she spent time teaching in London during the 1920s before going to work at the independent Gregynog Press in the early 1930s with McCance and her former instructors Gertrude Hermes and Blair Hughes-Stanton.

In the later 1930s, Parker separated from the Gregynog Press and produced some of her best work. Illustrations for an edition of Thomas Gray's poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," gained critical acclaim. From her home on the Scottish Isle of Arran, where she moved after World War II and lived for the rest of her life, Parker also illustrated editions of the Thomas Hardy novels, Tess of the Durbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure, among others, in the 1950s and '60s. Many of Parker's personal papers, including sketches and proofs for illustrations, circa 1913-1972, are held today by the Manuscripts Division of the National Library of Scotland; her sketchbooks prove her affinity for animals, birds, and aquatic life.

Best known for her equestrian sculptures, Gill Parker sculpts a wide range of animals. Her bronzes attempt to capture the mood and movement of each individual animal, as she has made it her goal with every sculpture to convey it's individual spirit. Her goal is to imbue each subject with dignity and beauty, and does not create sentimental portraits.

Sculpting was initially only a hobby for Parker until 1983, when she decided to make a career out of her love for the art. An animal lover since childhood, Parker was initially influenced by the work of Frederic Remington and his contemporaries. Parker is primarily self-taught, and she quickly began to develop a style all her own, not wanting to become an offshoot of earlier masters.

Parker's Giraffe (1999), shows her current trend of portraying animals aside from horses. It also serves to demonstrate her movement towards a less detailed style, with the smooth curving lines of the giraffe's neck that leads seamlessly into the body. The orange patina is indicative of her recent experiments with a wider variety of shades, and how they affect the mood of the subject.

Below is Gill Parker's Artist Statement:

"It may sound like a cliche but my greatest inspiration really does come from the natural world. I have always had a fascination with animals, long before it became clear that I would have a career as an artist. I was horse mad as a child and always had pets. The first bronzes I saw were those of the Animaliere school and Remington. Although I admire them, and some of my earlier works were probably influenced by the animaliers in particular, I quickly tried to develop my own style, and made a conscious effort to not look at other artist's sculpture. I used to make a lot of equestrian sculpture, but for the last four years or so I have concentrated more on wildlife. I also used to work in a lot of detail and still can if a particular commission demands it, but generally, to create the image I want with the wildlife subjects, I have simplified my style and experimented with some new and different patinas. To me, the challenge is to take an animal and find the way to portray its particular feel, character, and movement: to try and get beneath the surface and find its spirit. There is a point in the making of a sculpture when it seems to take on a life of its own and I still find this whole creation process fascinating and exciting.
I'm not sure if I really believe it is harder for a woman artist, any more than in any other field. Maybe sometimes people think they can take advantage, but as I'm never likely to know what its like to be a male artist its difficult to say! As an artist who sells internationally it can sometimes be difficult dealing with countries whose culture does not see woman as equal members of society, but this is unusual. I always hope that people will judge me solely on the quality of my work, after all its my work that they will have to live with, not me!
What about the future? I am looking forward to the opportunity to work on more exciting projects. I am increasingly being asked to make more large, monumental pieces, which are going all over the world."

Titian Ramsay Peale was born into a career as an artist. His father, Charles Willson Peale, was a painter who produced the first portrait of General George Washington in 1772. Titian, Charles’s second son from his first marriage, also became a successful artist. Although Titian attended anatomy lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, much of his education was privately directed by his father, who allowed his children to study in the Philadelphia Museum, (then called Peale's Museum, located next to Independence Hall) which Charles organized and founded.

During this time, Philadelphia had an active scientific community. It is not surprising that Titian, inspired by his surroundings, became a natural history painter. In 1817, Titian was elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Pennsylvania, and shortly thereafter he joined fellow academicians Thomas Say, William Maclure, and George Ord in a research expedition to Florida and Georgia. Finding the adventurous life of exploring, studying, and painting in wild places appealing, Titian enthusiastically joined Stephen Harriman Long's United States Government expedition to the Midwest in 1819 as an assistant naturalist. He completed 122 illustrations of previously unrecorded flora and fauna.

In the years following the Long Expedition, Peale established a successful career as a natural history illustrator. He worked with his former expedition-mate Say, who was writing a study of American insects in 1824. Peale exhibited four watercolors at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1822, the same year he married Eliza Laforgue. Upon his father’s death in 1827, he became curator of the Peale Museum, making him one of America's earliest museum curators.

Titian also joined a two-year expedition to the Magdalena River in South America in 1830; when he returned home, he composed a monumental study of butterflies. It was from 1838 – 1842, however, that Titian undertook his most ambitious enterprise: traveling on the first American research expedition around the entire globe. He had a difficult time publishing some of his work w because of conflicts with the expedition's captain, Charles Wilkes. After 1849, Titian took a job with the United States Patent Office to earn a sufficient living. While working in the Patent Office, Titian became interested in the developing art of photography, and also painted in oils extensively. He formed the Philosophical Society of Washington and the Amateur Photographic Exchange Club, America's first organization dedicated to photography. Titian Peale passed away in Philadelphia in 1885.

As is the case with many successful artists, Pablo Picasso received his earliest education and encouragement in art from his parents. Picasso's father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, was a drawing instructor at the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes in his native Malaga and a bird painter. Blasco began teaching his son around 1888, when the boy was still very young, leading him to draw and paint his own personal favorite subjects, such as bullfights. Picasso showed great promise and enthusiasm for art, and he enrolled in his father's drawing classes at about age eleven, in 1892, at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in the family's new town, La Corua. By 1895, Picasso was painting "from nature," producing a series of fifteen oil portraits of people he knew and saw about town. In that same year, Picasso's father moved his family again, this time to Barcelona, so that he could teach at the Escuela de Bellas Artes there. Before he reached his fifteenth birthday, Picasso was admitted to an upper level class in classical art and still life at the academy, but attended infrequently. At about this time, Picasso began to show his need to be an independent artist. Until about 1904, when he finally settled in Paris, France, Picasso nomadically moved between areas in his native Spain and the French capital several times. All the while, he was exhibiting and making contacts in the art world. 1899 found him in Barcelona, often within the walls of the Catalan cafe, "The Four Cats," where he communed with other young artists and writers, and, in a way, completed his artistic education. By 1900, he was participating in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, having submitted a work entitled Last Moments. Around 1905, Picasso attracted the interest of American ex-patriot art collectors Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude Stein, and he joined their circle. Drawing inspiration from both contemporary movements in art and from "primitive" influences, such as African tribal masks, Picasso developed Cubism around 1908 in conjunction with French artist Georges Braque. Just prior to this time, he had done his first sculptures in wood. By 1910, Picasso had reached a new level of success, exhibiting throughout Europe and North America. In a career already distinguished by invention, Picasso began creating collages and sculptural constructions in 1912, which changed the way people thought about dimensionality. During World War I, many of Picasso's closest friends went off to fight, though he stayed behind and worked on his art. He became associated with the Ballets Russes around this time, and began to design theatre sets. He also met his wife, dancer Olga Koklova, during this period; the couple married in the summer of 1918. Picasso later separated from Koklova, replacing her with Marie-Therese Walter, whom he met in 1927 (and who would not be the last in a long line of love interests). The 1920s and '30s found Picasso experimenting with different media and exploring surrealism. He spent a great deal of his time illustrating books during this period, as well. In 1930, Picasso won the Carnegie International prize, and 1932 brought the first major retrospective of his work at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. After 1936, Picasso began a period of making art that expressed opinions on current political situations. During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republican Government made Picasso director of the Museo del Prado, and he was also asked to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, for which he painted his famous Guernica. Picasso spent the years of World War II in Paris writing poetry and plays, painting, and even casting some bronze sculptures. Following World War II, he joined the French Communist Party, and though one might think this affiliation would have hurt his celebrity in the 1950s, he only became more and more popular throughout the world. He was the subject of a 1955 film entitled Le Mystere Picasso, and a monumental retrospective of his work was produced at the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais in Paris. In 1967, he refused the French government's offer of the Legion of Honor. Living along the Mediterranean in the South of France for much the rest of his life after the World War II era, Picasso died at age 91 in 1973.

While growing up in New York, Pleissner spent several summers in Wyoming where he developed a life-long love of fishing. He attended the Art Students League from 1922 to 1926 and began teaching at the Pratt Institute soon after. Throughout the 1930s, Pleissner worked exclusively in oils and became known for his Western landscapes and images of the Maritimes and New England. He was commissioned as a captain in the United States Air Force at the start of World War II and stationed in the Aleutians as a war artist. Due to the physical constraints, Pleissner switched from oil painting to watercolor at this time and continued with the medium for the remainder of his artistic career. After Congress withdrew war art funding, he began working as a war correspondent for Life magazine in Europe. After the war, Pleissner continued to travel to Europe and Wyoming, painting city scenes, landscapes, and sporting subjects.

Life donated the company's entire collection of World War II art, including over eighty Pleissner paintings, to the Army Art Department, so his work hangs in the halls and offices at the Pentagon, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. His paintings are also part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other museum collections. In addition to winning numerous awards from the National Academy of Design, he served as the organization's vice-president.

"I find that I can learn more about what I am doing by going outside somewhere, in nature, and walking through fields or climbing the mountains or walking down a street and looking at the thing as such rather than going through the hands of another artist. I love to look, and get the biggest kick from a good Constable, Homer, Turner, or Monet, and so forth; but I really don't learn a great deal from a picture."

(Quote source: Rockwell Museum. American Western Art. New York: Rockwell Museum, 1989, 65.)

At the age of fourteen, Wolfgang Pogzeba came with his family to the United States from Germany and eventually settled in Denver, Colorado. He received a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Colorado in 1960 and received a master's degree in education in 1962. He also studied at the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Mexico in Mexico City, the Kunstakademie in Munich, and the Sorbonne in Paris. His professional career as an artist was launched with a one-man show at the Historical Society Museum of Montana in 1960, and he continued to show in one-man and group exhibitions in both galleries and museums across the country.

As a modern artist, Pogzeba worked across several media, including sculpture, painting, photography, and architecture, and thematically focused his early work on the West. His images are somewhat abstract yet retain recognizable forms. Pogzeba's sculptural work, which is a combination of the traditional western and the unconventional modern, is aesthetic rather than documentary. Distorting the figures to create a powerful drama, Pogzeba simplified forms by abstracting the surfaces into broad planes. Also, the artist cast his own sculptures, reworked the surfaces, and applied many layers of patina to each work. In the early 1970s, Pogzeba moved away from western subjects to experiment with new subjects and media. Because of the artist's death at an early age, his work is relatively rare but is included in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections, such as the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, and the Great Plains Art Museum.

Born in a small village near Dijon, France, to working-class parents in 1855, Francois Pompon began his artistic career as an apprentice marble carver in a Dijon funerary monument company. During the early 1870s, he studied architecture, engraving, and sculpture in evening courses at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. By 1876, when he was twenty-one years old, Pompon had moved to Paris in order to continue his study of art. He enrolled in evening classes at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs, so that he also had time for gainful employment. Because the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1871 had caused significant damage to the French capital just a few years prior to his arrival, Pompon was able to make a living working on projects in the rebuilding efforts. For example, the young sculptor helped produce architectural ornamentation for the new Hotel de Ville de Paris. His academic career was soon bringing moderate success, as well, as Pompon made his Salon debut in 1879, exhibiting a statue of Victor Hugo's Cosette (from Les Miserables). The early years of the 1880s brought Pompon's marriage to dressmaker Berthe Velain, but little is known about the sculptor's career until he began studying with Auguste Rodin in 1890. It is probable that his early Salon success prompted Pompon to spend much of the 1880s attempting to become an independent artist, but he encountered difficulty since he was still searching for his personal style. He began to focus on the animal form in his work around this time, inspired by Pierre-Louis Rouillard, who was an animalier sculptor he'd met during the course of his education. He also slowly divorced himself from realism in his sculpture. Consequently, Pompon spent many years working for different master sculptors; between the years 1890 and 1893, he worked and studied in Rodin's atelier, becoming one of that sculptor's head assistants. Between 1896 and 1916, Pompon worked for popular sculptor Renae de Saint-Mareaux. The latter master's death allowed Pompon to once again attempt independence, though it was not until around 1919 that he finally had a breakthrough, when the Muse de Luxembourg purchased a turtledove he had sculpted in stone. Following this, the Muse de Grenoble purchased three plaster works in 1921. In 1922, at age 67, Pompon showed his L'Ours Blanc (or, Polar Bear) at the Salon de'Automne, receiving almost instant fame for the plaster sculpture (later produced in marble). Although much of his career was spent working with other artists, Pompon garnered many awards for his own work, which is now held in the collections of major museums throughout the world. Of course, most of Pompon's works still reside in France; the final ten years of his life were spent creating as an independent sculptor, and he left about 300 works to the French state upon his death in 1933. 1964 saw a major retrospective of Pompon's work in his native Dijon.

After graduating from secondary school, Rien Poortvliet served in the Royal Dutch Marines. Although he received no formal training in drawing or painting, he then spent fifteen years illustrating for an advertising agency and also illustrated children's books and German hunting magazines. He produced calendars for seventeen years and published almost a dozen books, some of which he wrote with writer Wil Huygen. One of his publications, Gnomes (1976), became known worldwide and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Poortvliet painted whatever captured his imagination, including people, animals, gnomes, trolls, and landscapes. He claimed there were no messages in his work; the paintings were simply representations of nature or scenes from his imagination . Using a loose and confident style, Poortvliet worked from real life, memory, or his imagination, but never from photographs. He greatly admired American Robert Abbett and Swede Bruno Liljefors who also painted animals.

"I use my talent to show to people how brilliant a hare can jump, how lovely the dear Lord created evenings and sunsets or blizzards or storms or snow or a roe feeding her fawn. That's my favorite joy."

(Source: McIntosh, Michael. "Rien Poortvliet and the Nature of Nature," Wildlife Art News (September/October 1991): 32-43)

As a youth, Alexander Pope carved and sketched animals around his home in Massachusetts. In the 1860s, he worked for his family’s lumber business. Pope studied carving, painting, perspective, and anatomy with William Rimmer, an important romantic-baroque sculptor, painter, and influential teacher of many Boston artists. From 1879 to 1883, Pope created many well-received carvings of game. Czar Alexander III of Russia acquired two of the carvings. In 1893, Pope began painting animal portraits and, later, pursued a career as a portrait painter. Eventually, he was considered one of the best Bostonian trompe l’oeil painters of the nineteenth century. The French term trompe l‘oeil means deception of the eye. Trompe l’oeil paintings appear so real that they trick the viewer into thinking they are seeing an actual scene rather than a painted one.

Pope is particularly well known for his illusionist paintings and wood carvings of birds, rabbits, and firearms hanging on slate-colored doors. Side by side in the JKM Gallery, the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s painted Hanging Grouse and carved Mallard Against A Woven Basket both are illusionist renderings of ducks strung up against slate doors.

Pope’s work is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

As a young boy, Alexander Phimister Proctor and his family traveled throughout the American West, eventually settling in Denver. He worked as a cowboy, staked homestead and mining claims, and served as a deputy in the lawless mining region of Colorado. Proctor hunted throughout the West with his horses and dogs, continually sketching animals and western subjects. In 1885, his desire for formal artistic training led him to New York to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. At that time, he created his first bronze statues of a fawn, a bear cub, a cub and rabbit, and a stalking panther. He also produced sculptures for the Chicago World's Fair in 1892 and 1893. In 1895, Proctor won the Rinehart Scholarship, which enabled him to join the active sculpting community in Paris, France.

Proctor is primarily known for his monumental sculptures of Native Americans and wildlife that now reside in museums, public parks, and governmental sites across North America, including the State Capital Grounds in Salem, Oregon, the Civic Center in Denver, Colorado, and the A. Phimister Proctor Museum near Seattle, Washington. Throughout his life, Proctor completed many commissions, including bronze Buffalo Heads for the Arlington Cemetery Bridge, Bison for the Q Street Bridge in Washington, DC, and a representation of Theodore Roosevelt as Rough Rider. At age 80, he completed a commission for one of his last and finest creations, Monument to the Mustangs, which stands before the University of Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. Proctor's Prairie Monarch is central to the Bison Gallery of the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Being the only bronze in the museum that is "free to touch," this bison sculpture is always a visitor favorite. Proctor's work is also recognized in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Gilcrease Museum.

Best known for his cast bronze animals, Arthur Putnam was born in 1873 in Waveland, Mississippi, and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. As a youth, Putnam preferred to spend his time outdoors rather than in school. As a last attempt to get him interested in academics, his mother sent him to Kemper Hall Military Academy where he lasted only a year before he was asked to leave. Instead of attending school, Putnam worked. He first worked as an elevator boy, and then as an assistant in a photoengraving office where he learned the rudiments of drawing. His mother later moved the family to San Diego where she had bought a lemon ranch. Putnam's teenage years were filled with work on the ranch and drawing the wildlife he saw around him. In 1894 he attended the San Francisco Mid-Winter Fair and stayed to take art lessons from Julie Heyneman at the Art Students League. Putnam returned to San Diego in 1898 to work as a surveyor for the Mesa Dam, which was then being built. He married Grace Story, whom he met at the San Diego Art School, in July of 1899 in Sacramento, and the couple had two children. The years between 1900-1905 were Putnam's most productive, and he produced the work that he is best known for during this time. Putnam, his family, and some friends traveled to Paris in 1905 and he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1906. It was in Paris that he became acquainted with and greatly admired Auguste Rodin and his work. The family returned to San Francisco in 1906 right after the infamous major earthquake that destroyed most of the city. In 1911 Putnam's art career came to an end when a tumor was removed from his brain. The surgery caused paralysis on the left side of his body, loss of perception, and violent, abrupt changes in mood. He and Grace Putnam divorced shortly afterwards. Putnam remarried on March 19, 1917 to Marion Pearson; in 1921 they moved to Europe. Putnam died in 1930 in Paris.