Over the past month, a Thai baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng has captured the hearts of millions. For many of us, images of the buxom creature have filled our screens with hours of delight as her soft figure distracts us from the horrors in the news. Her rapid rise is due to her admirable pink cheeks? Or is it because she is kind of Grumpy catwith her screaming and leg chewing (which has somewhat crossed into meme territory) the perfectly suited to the chaos from 2024? Maybe instead it’s the fact that she’s a very dangerous mammal in a bite-sized version – some would even say delicious – form.
If we look at art history, we see that Moo Deng is far from the first hippopotamus to enchant audiences near and far, both in and out of captivity. Just as images of Moo Deng range from cute to creepy, artists have also taken different approaches to illustrating a species that is cute to look at from afar, but not so much up close. Let’s revisit some of them potato-shaped sensation’s ancestors, who waddled so she could zoom.
Hippopotamus (“Willem”) (ca. 1961–1878 BC), Ancient Egypt, Middle Kingdom
If you often look at the stories of ancient Egypt gentle hippopotamus statues, you may not have known that the animals were widely feared. Today, hippos are responsible for hundreds of the number of fatalities in Africa per year. But in ancient Egypt they posed more threats than just their enormous bites: they could also overturn boats on the Nile and, like hungry herbivores, destroy hard-fought fields of grain.
During the New Kingdom era (c. 1550–1070 BCE), hippos were associated with the fearsome and sometimes angry god Seth. But in the time of the Middle Kingdom, some two hundred years earlier, features such as hippos’ habit of diving underwater for minutes and emerging gloriously gave them another meaning: new life. This is the era of “William”, the bright blue ceramic statue that serves as the unofficial mascot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. William is decorated with lotus plants, which also symbolize rebirth, and is just under five inches tall (~11.3 centimeters). His legs, now recovered, may have originally been broken off to prevent him from attacking the person he was buried with. Perhaps artists depicted hippos like William endearing with a similar goal: to disarm their own fear.
Figurine of the pregnant hippopotamus goddess Taweret, Egypt, Late Period-Ptolemaic Period (664-30 BC)
Just like Moo Deng and her mother Jona warm our hearts with them snoutsThe ancient Egyptians also noticed that hippopotamus mothers have a close and loving relationship with their babies. This late Kingdom statue is on display Taweretthe goddess who protects mothers and their children, as a pregnant woman with the body of a hippopotamus in statues and carvings. While the goddess took this form centuries earlier (which is actually a chimera of a hippopotamus, lion and crocodile), she did not become widely venerated until the later ancient Egyptian eras, where eventually almost every household kept a figure of her for protection. their young.
Jacob Van Maerlant’s “Iphotamus” in Der Naturen Bloeme (ca. 1340-1350 CE)
Oh, medieval European artists! We never tire of your fantastic interpretations of animals that you only heard about through a global telephone game. Honestly, what would you do if you were the illuminator of the Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant Der Naturen Bloeme (ca. 1350), charged with drawing a ‘water horse’ that also looks like a “dolphin”? Although this is the only illustration actually called ‘iphotamus’ – a repetition of ‘hippopotamus’ derived from the Greek words for ‘water’ and ‘horse’ – it is just one of many times the artist attempted to depict a large amphibious creature to be depicted in Maerlant’s massive manuscript. Don’t doubt the medieval artisan, though: Shirin Fozi, associate curator at the Department of Medieval Art and The Met Cloisters, told Hyperallergic Last year, these artists often knew very well that they were drawing something ridiculous: a self-consciousness reflected in many Moo Deng memes today.
Adrie Coenen, Fish book (1579)
Around 1570, European artists started to do well. Dutch fishmonger Adriaen Coenen earned his living in the ocean, where he worked as a fisherman and salvage master. Its 410 pages Fish bookmeaning ‘fish book’, was completed in 1579 after three years of research. Some illustrations depict creatures he would have seen in real life, while others are faithful imitations of engravings produced elsewhere, all accompanied by ornate borders and detailed text. This may have been a passion project of his, an effort to share his love for the waters and the creatures of the world so that, as he wrote, “whoever reads or studies it / can spread the word to / another, so that he it can see and hear.” Among these watercolor and ink artworks of whales, bones and fantastic creatures is a blue hippopotamus taking a bite out of a long-tailed reptile – perhaps foreshadowing Moo Deng’s arrival, right down to her large eyes. while she chews softly on the limbs of her zookeeper friends.
Kalabari Otobo Masks
The Kalabari people, who have traditionally lived in the delta of the Niger River, continue the age-old craft of sculpting otobo masksnamed after the hippopotamus, which she also poetic referred to as ‘the beast that holds back the rushing tide’. Unlike other images from history, the dancers who wear these masks are not concerned about the ferocity of an angry hippo. Dancers wearing the otobo mask imitate a dangerous water spirit through aggressive movements; spectators would do well not to provoke them.
Peter Paul Rubens, “The hippopotamus and crocodile hunt” (1616)
Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens’s 1616 depiction of a hunt for crocodiles and hippos near the Nile depicts a veritable cyclone of destruction, combining his time’s interests in natural history with violent hunting scenes, classical themes and Orientalist painting. It’s hard to imagine that sweet little Moo Deng is related to the fearsome beast at the center of the action – although even here the hippo’s side eye could indicate that it would much rather laze in a river than fight for its life .
The violence in this painting was echoed by the plundering during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, a fate that befell several other hunting paintings. Of the group, only this work was returned to its original home base in Munich, where it is now in the possession of the Alte Pinakothek.
Michal Piotr Boym, Flora Sinensis
This bizarre depiction of two hippos comes from Michal Piotr Boym, a Polish Jesuit missionary who traveled through Mozambique in the 1640s. Perhaps the misshapen nature of his strangely charming hippos is due to the fact that he drew them from memory after settling in China. It is difficult to determine why the African creature ended up there Flora Sinensis (1656), Boym’s tome on Chinese plants and wildlife. But it is just one of his many drawings that, although not entirely lifelike, are still seductive. I’d like to think he would have loved drawing Moo Deng’s belly roll.
Obaysch and “The Hippopotamus Polka” (1850s)
More than a century and a half before Moo Deng came onto the scene, Obaysch was the hippo name on everyone’s lips. In the 1850s he made history as the first hippopotamus seen in Europe since ancient Roman times. Caught on the Nile and maintained in the London Zoo with gallons of cow’s milk, Obaysch was soon visited by Queen Victoria of England and attracted thousands of fans every day. He even inspired composer Louis St. Mars to write “The hippopotamus polka,” which was published alongside a humorous sheet music illustration by lithographer John H. Sherwin.
Guy Fawkes in the Beach magazine
After two failed attempts to produce viable offspring, Obaysch and his lover Adhela (a female hippopotamus later introduced to his enclosure) finally had a daughter in 1872, named after 17th-century English conspirator Guy Fawkes. For the film she was visited by writer Arthur Morrison and illustrator JA Shepard 34th edition of the Beach magazine in 1894, when she had assumed enormous proportions at the age of 22.
Morrison writes that Shepard seemed dissatisfied with Guy Fawkes’ desire to take a nap. “It is not easy to catch the hippopotamus in a moment of extravagant agility,” he wrotein which the process of sketching hair is described as “a task of long waiting, tiring sitting, tiring standing, much loitering, deferred hopes, heart disease, and eventual disappointment.”
Ultimately, however, Morrison waxed poetic about the hippopotamus, writing, “Let her lie on it and she would extinguish a volcano and drive an earthquake to some part where the earth’s crust was less immovably oppressed.”
Herman Jr. Poses for Frederik Willem Zürcher
In 1865, the Dutch artist Frederik Willem Zürcher made a series of priceless sketches of a baby hippopotamus named Herman Jr. Amsterdam City ArchivesHerman was the world’s first hippopotamus to survive a birth in captivity. Born by Herman Sr. and Marguetta, also known as ‘Betsy’, he seems to have charmed his portrayer as much as Moo Deng has charmed millions today. Zürcher signed Herman submerged in his little pool, lazing in the sunand rest his laughing head on a pillow – but was it really there, or did the artist dream of decorating the hippo’s enclosure to keep him cozy? (If the kissing was indeed just a fantasy, I would certainly understand; I daydream about all the tutus I would like to tie around Moo Deng’s plump belly.)
