Animal Sculpture

This page links to the several pages devoted to statues and sculpture of animals which have accululated on this site. Victorian and Edwardian sculpture, like that of preceding ages, has been above all preoccupied with the human form, whether it be the portrait statue or bust of a statesman or the allegorical nude figure, an archetypical statue of a soldier on a war memorial, or an angel or weeping girl against a funereal urn on a church monument. However, animals feature fairly widely in British sculpture, and not merely in the case of the horses familiar from equestrian portrait statues (see this page and this page for some of those), or in the rare cases where animal statues are brought together as a feature in themselves, as in Cardiff's Animal Wall. There are three particularly frequent instances when animals feature in sculpture in England at least:

Allegorical groups, where the animal sculpture symbolises particular countries or continents, as in the groups on the Albert Memorial, or the animal sculpture is used as a shorthand to indicate for example pastoral or agricultural scenes.
Heraldic animals on shields or coats of arms or free-standing, sometimes extremely stylised, but often naturalistic.
Animal heads as a decorative device in architectural sculpture, rather in the manner of gargoyles on medieval churches.

Examples of all these types can be found on the pages linked below - click on the picture or text.