The glorious art of Zdenek Burian – and its not so glorious follow-up

Diplodocus carnegiei by Zdenek Burian (oil on canvas, 1969)

In the mid-1970s, when I was five or six years old, my mother bought a remarkably expensive book about past life for me, called Leven in de oertijd (published in English as Life before Man). Text was by Zdenek Spinar, but more importantly the illustrations were by the Czech artist Zdenek Burian (1905-1981) and were my first confrontations with all those wonderful animals of the past. It has to be said that Burian’s forte was in depicting Kenozoic animals and early humans, but the dinosaur illustrations and those of other animals of earlier times are very good, too. Burian’s inspiration by Charles Knight is obvious from many pictures, and his way of working with antagonists (T-Rex opposing a single Triceratops, that sort of thing) is similar too. But in all I find Burian’s paintings, with their hushed tones, more evocative. However, this is a judgment pickled in nostalgia, of course. Show ▼