Rudolph Zallinger

Rudolph Franz Zallinger (November 12, 1919 – August 1, 1995) was an American-based Austrian-Russian artist.

Rudolph Franz Zallinger was born in Irkutsk, Siberia in 1919 to Siberian refugees, Franz Xavier Zallinger and Maria Maria (Koncheravich) Zallinger.

Zallinger had one sister.

His family immigrated to Seattle, Washington in 1924.

Zallinger graduated at the Queen Anne High School in 1937.

In 1938, he won a scholarship at Yale University when he was urged to apply by John Butler, an artist from Seattle.

However, the wall looked too empty for oceanographer and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History (1938–1942), Albert Eide Parr.

He wanted to make a series of small paintings on the East wall, depicting what those skeletons would have looked like.

In 1941, Parr decided to put the task to Zallinger, a student at Yale University at the time who had been painting marine algae for him.

Lewis York, an art professor at the School of Fine Arts, also suggested that Zallinger would be up to the task.

He graduated in 1942 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

The same year Zallinger graduated from Yale University, he worked as a teacher in painting in Yale School of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1950 where he would paint his famous The Age of Reptiles.

Such professors include Carl Owen Dunbar (the Director of the Peabody Museum at Yale University, 1942–1959), Richard Swann Lull, G. Edward Lewis, and George Wieland.

It features a timeline of 350 million years of animal and plant evolution, showing the rise and fall of dinosaurs as the rulers of Earth.

Zallinger used trees to divide it into the various periods of geologic time, as the chronology moves from right to left.

Along with this, his wife is quoted as saying:"'We were in the art school, and he'd done some drawings of seaweed for Albert Parr, head of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. When Parr was looking for a design to put on the wall, an art professor told him to use the guy who did his seaweed.'"In 1942, Zallinger was hired to do this work, but he proposed to do a large-scale mural, rather than small individual painting, yielding a panoramic timeline.

He spent 6 months doing research, then created a sketch nearly 7 ft long, quite similar to the finished result.

He then coloured it and added details, which took him nearly a year, and used egg tempera.

It was painted from 1943 to 1947, with the help of a 6-month crash course in animal and plant life of the distant past and comparative anatomy with Yale's professors.

In 1943, he began his drawing of the mural, using charcoal.

The underpainting was finished in 1944, and the mural finally completed in June 1947.

His most notable works include his mural The Age of Reptiles (1947) at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the March of Progress (1965) with numerous parodies and versions.

He worked as an instructor for 5 years, and then 2 more until 1950 as an assistant professor.

In 1950, he went back to Seattle to work as a freelance artist and taught at Burnley School (now called The Art Institute of Seattle) for 3 years before returning to Yale again after accepting a commission by Life Magazine to create The Age of Mammals.

Once he returned, the museum appointed him as the "artist-in-residence", a position he held until his death.

He also enrolled as a Fellow in Geology to study for his next work.

This was later reversed when used in the Life Magazine to go from left to right in 1952.

The museum's Great Hall had the fossil reconstructions of various dinosaurs, including that of an Apatosaurus with an incorrect skull.

A 10 feet high by 24 feet wide (3 by 7.3 meters) mural was commissioned by General Insurance Company of America (SAFECO) in 1953.

His painting of a Tyrannosaurus heavily influenced the creature design of Toho Studios' Godzilla (1954).

Two of Zallinger's dinosaurs—the T. rex and Brontosaurus—are seen in that film as part of a slide demonstration during a lecture in the National Diet Building.

Born in Russia, he was raised in Seattle and became a prominent member of Yale University after painting his murals, gaining him awards and honors.

He made illustrations for Life magazine and illustrations for dinosaur books, which made more people aware of his mural work.

Because of the time in which they were painted, his murals have errors that are noticeable today but still remain a large achievement in his life.

From 1961 to his death, he worked in the University of Hartford in Connecticut, during which he worked on the mural of The Age of Mammals and received the James E. and Frances W. Bent Award from that university.

He continued to work on other projects, such as his Early History of Hartford.

Perhaps Zallinger's most well-known piece of art, The Age of Reptiles is a 110 ft wide by 16 ft tall mural, occupying the full length of the east wall of the Yale Peabody Museum's Great Hall.

A portion of the mural appeared on a United States postage stamp in 1970.

He later got a Master of Fine Arts at the Yale university in 1971, and a Doctor of Fine Arts at the University of New Haven, in 1980.

He painted it using the fresco-secco technique, most often used in the 15th century.