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Message: <blockquote data-quote="colleenc" data-source="post: 1728675" data-attributes="member: 76425">This has been true for a very long time, Carl Ringus(sp) said if he painted a landscape it went in a museum, the same landscape with an elk would go to a natural history museum. In the Peerless Eye about Liljefors, the writer tells of trying to get him in the collection of the Met, as one of the pivotal painters of his time and country, and was told it was too "genre" for the Met, the writer left, noticing all the genre paintings in the collection from the Flemish masters. Best explanation I've heard is the things of humans are considered more important than the animal life. So we have lots of animal paintings of dead game, sporting life and dramatic moments( like Stubbs horse attacked by a lion) that pertain to human life, but one with wildlife, it's natural history, and it's been that way for over a century, including our best masters like Bateman etc. who openly say they base compositions on abstract art and people like Franz Klein have been a major influcence.</blockquote>