In 1859 the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon, by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorilla Dragging Away a Dead Negress – a work that was found to be too confronting for both its graphic violence, and its proximity to current debates about evolution, in the year in which Charles Darwin published his landmark On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.
It remains an intriguing and little-known fact that the gorilla only became
officially known to Western naturalists in 1847, when the first images of gorilla
skulls were published in the Boston Journal of Natural History, prompting a
hunt for gorilla remains by museums world-wide. The first gorilla specimens
to be preserved by taxidermy in the Western world were placed on public display
in Paris’s Museum of Natural History in 1852.
Emmanuel Frémiet had been trained as an illustrator at the Museum of
Natural History in Paris, and he used their gorilla specimens as models for
his extraordinarily realistic depiction, for its day, of a scene of violence
in the forests of West Africa. (At this time gorillas were still widely believed
to be ferocious carnivores.) Frémiet’s sculpture, which was destroyed
in 1861 and is known from surviving photographs, stands as the first major representation
in Western art of the primate that would soon be claimed as ‘man’s
brother’ in the evolutionary debates that erupted in the wake of Darwin’s
publication of On the Origin of Species. It was indeed the gorilla’s purported
status as ‘a man and a brother’ that lay at the very heart of the
evolutionary and theological problems created by its discovery.
In 1887 a new life-size plaster sculpture by Frémiet, Gorilla Carrying
Off a Woman, provided another controversy for the artist; but this time a triumphal
one, as Frémiet himself now carried off the Paris Salon’s Medal
of Honour. Frémiet received permission from the French State to edition
bronze versions of this new gorilla sculpture in a reduced size, and these proved
to be highly popular collectables. The ambiguous but compelling Gorilla Carrying
Off a Woman was also reproduced widely, by both engraving and photography. By
all these means Frémiet’s sculpture entered the public consciousness
as one of the defining images of its time.
With all the current attention on the gorilla being created by the release of
Peter Jackson’s blockbuster remake of the 1933 blockbuster film King Kong,
this lecture reminds us of the long visual lineage that lay behind the immortal
cinematic imagery of Fay Wray in the arms of the beast Kong.