The 18th-century “kongouro” painted by George Stubbs will feature in an exhibition of animals depicted by artists who never saw their subjects in the flesh.
The pictures will also include an armour-plated rhinoceros, an elephant carrying the population of a small village on its back and a double-jointed lion, bottom.
“These images are important not for any scientific reason, obviously, but because they show how people thought of these fabulous animals,” Jack Ashby, manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology in London, told the Guardian.
The museum is borrowing and building an exhibition, Strange Creatures, around Stubbs’s kangaroo. The painting has been owned by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich since 2013. “Often it didn’t matter to people what the animals really looked like.