Jay Matternes : Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

The first career-spanning volume on Jay Matternes (b. 1933), whose scientific rigor and artistic skill set a new standard in natural history illustration. Millions have grown up inspired by Jay Matternes’ murals of extinct mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History.

Others have savoured his depictions of human origins in such prestigious publications as Science, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Natural History.

Matternes’ art has also graced popular books by such trailblazing wildlife scientists as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Louis Leakey. Now, for the first time, the entire scope of Matternes’ achievement is revealed in this full-colour retrospective, prepared with the artist’s full cooperation and featuring many works never before published.

Here are his depictions of living species, whose anatomical accuracy and vivid detail owe much to Matternes’ lifelong devotion to painting from nature: the wildlife of Africa, the birds of America, chimpanzees and gorillas, and more.

Here, too, is his paleoart, meticulously reconstructed from the fossil evidence and ranging from dinosaurs, through the rise of mammals, to our hominid ancestors — including Matternes’ groundbreaking reconstruction of the 4.4-million-year-old hominin Ardipithecus, on which he laboured in secrecy for more than a decade.

The highly readable text includes, among other special features, selections from the artist’s 20-year correspondence with the late Dian Fossey. Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter will be an essential volume not only for aspiring illustrators and paleoartists, but for anyone with an interest in the natural world and how we visualise it.