Guarisco Gallery 2012

32 Herbert W.Weekes he artist Herbert William Weekes, generally called William Weekes, excelled at romanticized portraits and animated pastoral scenes featuring animals. Often portraying pets and domestic animals in humorous predicaments, his favorite subjects—don- keys, geese, and pigs—were imbued with anthropo- morphic expressions and emotions. The assigning of human qualities to animals evoked a sympathetic reaction in 19th-century viewers. Victorians were charmed by the “humanness” of the animals depicted in Weekes’ work. Exhibitions: British Institute, London; Glasgow Inst. of the F.A.; Royal Acad., London; Royal Inst. of Oil Painters, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool The Romance of a Pig uring the 19th century there emerged in painting a renewed fondness for attributing human behavior and characteristics to animals, particularly dogs, monkeys, and pigs. This lending of human qualities had first appeared as a popular art form in the 17th century, but with the advent of new styles had fallen into disuse. Popular again in the latter half of the 19th century, Victorian painters in particular began depicting animals dressed in period costume, busily applying themselves to human tasks. Weekes’ series The Romance of a Pig , exemplifies his approach to animals in art, in which his animal charac- ters are whimsical, comical, and run the gamut of human emotions in exaggerated drama. In The Romance of a Pig , we observe the pig courting the cat, and experience with him the euphoria of in- fatuation and the dejection of a rebuff as the series progresses. Playing on the humorous supposition that animals relate to each other as humans, Weekes’ series is a charming example of a popular genre sub- ject in Victorian art. T D