'Hello, Lofty, is it cold up there?'
A discourse on giraffes
ii_ have recently had a lot of children on my hands. I enjoy taking the youngest through their reading books. Older ones I encourage to write: stories, poems, anything. What's it going to be like in Heaven? Or, why is war horrible? (Not all children think it is.) Above all, I set them drawing. What shall we draw, granddad? Oh — draw a giraffe. This is a real test. All children know what a giraffe is. But it is not just a very long neck on a short body poised on four long, thin legs. Drawn thus, it does not look right. I once had the chance to draw a real giraffe in an African gamepark. They are shy creatures and fear being drawn even more than do most other wild animals. But I had a good look at this one and decided that the key to getting a giraffe drawing right is to treat it as a tall triangle: the back ascends quite sharply from the tail up, until it culminates in a huge system of muscles that form the base of the neck. From then on the ascent is almost vertical but sinuous and serpentine. The head is another isosceles triangle, the eyes huge with magnificent long eyelashes. The ancients called giraffes camelopards, but there is nothing of the camel in this majestic and graceful beauty; and it has no spots — rather a crazy pattern of brownorange held together by gleaming white lines, like stripes of glittering mortar.
Altogether it is an astonishing exercise in creation, pure fantasy or rococo, God joking, but with a subtle, sensitive humour, as though keen to set problems for artists. The giraffe has a tongue nearly two feet long and is a superb vegetarian eating-machine. It can reach up to the juicy tops of the trees in its habitat, and has no need to tear them up by the roots like the destructive elephant. And to get at the lower stuff it just splays its enormous legs. Giraffes have virtually no weapons, offensive or defensive. They are always tremulous, on the watch, and sleep standing up. If threatened they rely on speed, at which they excel. One of the finest sights in the entire animal kingdom is giraffes, watched from a great distance, travelling at top speed. They seemingly progress by a slow, swaying motion, full of grace, but are in fact bounding over the ground at more than 60 miles an hour. What appears a miracle of biological survival is actually a simple matter of muscle, bone and lung-power — they can keep going at top speed much longer than the big cats can charge. How they mate is mysterious (to me), but I believe that the nubile female performs a stalky ritual dance to indicate that she is ready.
Artists were not keen to try their hand at this difficult creature, even if they had the opportunity to see one. In Europe the earliest giraffe I know of was presented by the Caliph of Baghdad to King Terrante of Naples in the last quarter of the 15th century, and lived in the zoo at Capo di Monte. But if anyone did a painting, it has not survived (like Raphael's monument to Hanno, Pope Leo X's elephant), However, in 1479 the Doge of Venice sent Gentile Bellini, brother of the great Giovanni, to the court of Mahomet II, Sultan of Turkey. When he came back, he painted a fantastic townscape, supposedly set in Alexandria, of 'St Mark Preaching', now in Milan.
The buildings are more Venetian than oriental, but the figures are authentic, with superb turbaned magnificos and veiled ladies, and in the background a giraffe leading an elephant up the steps of what looks like an orientalised St Mark's Cathedral. The giraffe is a fine effort, clearly done from life, with the details of the neck musculature faithfully rendered. What a pity the original sketch of this rare creature has not survived. Bellini's father Jacopo kept his drawings in bound volumes, and they are now in the Louvre. But Gentile took no such precaution, and most of the exotic haul he brought back from Constantinople has perished.
One of the finest renderings of a giraffe in art came up for sale at Sotheby's in 1996. It is by Nicolas Huet the Younger (1770-1828) and is quite large, to a scale of one in 12, painted in watercolour, black ink and gouache on vellum. Huet was a friend of the Empress Josephine and he specialised in animals and plants. When she gave her personal menagerie to the Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. Huet was appointed official painter of the combined institution. This beast was given, I think, as a coronation present by the Turkish viceroy of Egypt to Charles X of France. The gift was made in 1825. but it was two years before the King got him. A ship had to be specially prepared to convey him from Alexandria to Marseilles by cutting a hole in the deck through which his head could protrude. When it rained or the sea-spray was fierce, an umbrella had to be held over his head. He came from the Sudan, and three Sudanese servants looked after him. He was provided with two antelopes for company, and a scroll with a consolatory verse from the Koran was hung round his neck to cheer him up spiritually. He required, we are told, 25 litres of milk each day, and these were provided by three cows which travelled with him. What a to-dot When the boat docked at Marseilles on 13 October 1826, he was greeted by the Prefect of the Departement of Bouches-du-Rhone, Monsieur Villeneuve-Bargemont, who made a speech of welcome.
He passed the winter recovering from his arduous sea voyage in sunny Provence, then set out for Paris on foot, taking a month for the journey, and during rainy days protected by a special mackintosh cape bearing the arms of France and Egypt. At last he reached St Cloud and was greeted by the King in person in front of the Orangerie, thereafter taking up his quarters in the Jardin des Plantes. The watercolour by Huet was commissioned by the professors and administrators of the Musee d'Histoire Naturelle and sent to the Egyptian viceroy in token of gratitude. It is a shame that Victor Hugo, then a fervent royalist who had figured at Charles X's crowning, did not complete the thank-you letter by writing a sonnet to the noble beast. I don't know what the giraffe was called — Claude, or Claudette, are favourite names for giraffes in France. He was known as bel enfant des tropiques, and relished France, dying at a ripe old age in 1845, by which time his royal master had long since been confined to the dustbin of history. In 1984 the Muscle de l'Ile de France held an exhibition to commemorate this much-travelled and long-lived quadruped; would that I had the catalogue of that event. I don't know who bought the Huet watercolour, but he or she is a lucky owner.
Good paintings of giraffes are rare. Stubbs, who loved exotic challenges — his zebra, now in the Yale Center for British Art, is his masterpiece, rivalled only by the National Gallery's `Whistlejack' — never did one, Neither did Gericault nor even Delacroix, who spent so much time in Africa. One reason why giraffe paintings are scarce is that collectors do not like tall, narrow pictures. That is why no great painter, with the sole exception of Bierstadt, has done the enormous sequoia trees of California, the culminating point of the world's flora and nature's masterpiece. I recall Lord Reith, a sad, grumpy old man and the loftiest grandee of his day. complaining, 'If you're really tall, they're all against you. You don't fit into their small ideas.'
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