ART! Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age at Rosecliff

“Wild Imagination” Art Exhibition at Rosecliff, Newport

The changing relationship between Americans and animals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is explored in the exhibition “Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age,” which opened Friday, Aug. 30, at Rosecliff.

With a focus on Newport’s history, “Wild Imagination” will bring together a menagerie of animal-inspired artworks and other objects, from paintings, sculptures, photographs and fashions to fancy dog collars and sea creatures blown in glass.

“We’ve always talked about the Gilded Age as a period of transformation, and this is a fascinating variation on that theme,” said Trudy Coxe, CEO and Executive Director of The Preservation Society of Newport County, which is organizing the exhibition. “It’s a period that saw terrible destruction of wild animals and their habitats but also the beginning of the humane movement and the growing popularity of pets.”

In the late 19th century, Americans moved in large numbers from farms to cities, losing touch with a rural way of life and with the closeness to nature and animals that defined it. Nostalgia for a lost kinship with animals pervaded urban, industrial America. At the same time, many were encountering new, “exotic” species through a boom in foreign travel, marine exploration and imperial expansion. More everyday Americans enjoyed natural history pursuits like birdwatching. Pet keeping surged. And while captive animals thrilled spectators at zoos and circuses, which both had their heyday in the Gilded Age, activists launched the nation’s first animal rights movement.

Newporters played a vital, though often contradictory, part in these developments. They fought at the vanguard of the animal rights movement yet set the era’s fashion for furs and feathers as residents of its most stylish summer resort. Newporters pampered their pets but expanded industries like the railroads that ravaged wildlife habitats.

“Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age” will be open August 30 through January 12, 2025, and is included with admission to Rosecliff.