This hand colored etching by the Swiss artist Johann Rudolph Schellenberg (1740-1806) appeared in (1775-1778), the best known work by the Swiss poet and physiogomist Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801). Lavater’s two main sources were G. della Porta and Sir Thomas Brown. Lavater’s physiognomic theories and the human/animal analogy had a profound impact on caricaturists, particularly Grandville and Daumier. The artist Schellenberg is also known for engraving illustrations after Chodowiecki in J.B. Basedow’s Elementarwerk (1785) in which the rhino is thought to have been inspired by a lost drawing of J.E. Ridinger. The hippo & camel heads in this print are taken directly from Ridinger’s Thierreich series (1768).
