Once again: Marie Hubrecht. Are you tired of me talking about Marie Hubrecht yet? Because I’m not done. If you want more Hubrecht, check out my reviews of Verdwenen Werelden here, here and here, and our Verdwenen Werelden podcast episode here! This post is a direct companion to my last one, in which I detail the time I went to see the spectacular murals she made in the 1920s at the former Girls’ Lyceum in Amsterdam. These paintings have been lovingly restored in the 2010s and can now be seen in their full glory in the central hall of the Joke Smit College.
Let us begin, then, to apply some of our signature Vintage Dinosaur Art analysis on the works themselves, and why not start with the big one?
Here it is: The mighty Tempus Jurassicum / Tempus Cretaceum diptych. We must forgive her for the use of cod Latin in the paintings’ titles.
All the images on this post come from this excellent website by Marie’s biographer Dicky van der Zalm, and are used with permission. The high quality photographs are taken by Wim Ruigrok. Before this, I’d never seen a proper high-res reproduction of the Jurassic/Cretaceous mural. I’ve always suspected that this might be a better work than the equivalent pieces in Verdwenen Werelden, and having now seen it for real, I can confirm that it is. Out of the surviving Hubrecht works, this is undoubtedly her masterpiece. And it’s a dinosaur piece, hurray! A bespoke canvas, painted ex situ to fit the north wall of the hall, seven by three metres big, depicting the flora and fauna of the Jurassic on the left, the Cretaceous on the right and a sea between, showing both Jurassic and Cretaceous life.
The work as a whole has a very pleasing visual balance to it, with two pieces of land separated by sea. Although it is very busy, always the case with Hubrecht, the sea in the middle gives it a point of rest. It works both as a whole and on a very intricate, detailed scale.
Of the seven paintings, this is chronologically the last one, in geological terms. Nevertheless, according to Dicky, this is the second canvas Marie started working on, after the completion of the Cambrian/Silurian diptych. It’s probably the one she was most excited about, most dreading, and, being the most dinosaur-heavy one, the most spectacular. There’s a lot to pick apart here… let’s start with some general observations, and then work our way left to right.
When you compare this work, finished in 1926, with Verdwenen Werelden, which she started work on after this, the first thing to note is that the work is of a completely different scale. The painting is huge in a way that you probably can’t fully comprehend until you’re in a room with it. Meanwhile, the later Verdwenen Werelden paintings are about as big in real life as they appear in the book. That means that between the murals and the book, she had to dramatically alter the scale on which she worked, from massive to small. There are many similarities between this painting and many of the paintings that appear in the book. The Jurassic land scene on the left (with the four sauropods) appears, on the face of it, almost as-is as a piece in Verdwenen Werelden. The sea in the middle is reworked into two separate paintings in the book, and the Cretaceous land scene is also spread out over two paintings.
Here’s the Jurassic scene from the book again. Again, this is basically the left side of the mural, reworked on a much smaller scale. I’m not going to painstakingly compare every detail of the mural against every detail in the book (I’ve done some of that in the review of the book) but one thing does strike me, now as much as it did before. The book version is much darker, gloomier, painted in shades of green and gray. The sky is dark and stormy, the animals hard to make out. The muted red plates of the stegosaurs and the blue wings of the Archaeopteryx are among the few splashes of colour. I have seen the original piece and the colouration is not an artifact of reproduction; this is pretty much what it looks like.
Now let’s look at the same scene from the mural. Much more vibrant and colourful. Bright blue skies. Technicolor sauropods with high-contrast patterns. Red water reeds, green plants, yellow sand and all sorts of Hubrechtian little details. I wonder why she dulled her palette for the dinosaur scenes so much for the book compared to these originals.
Maybe the answer lies in her work on Cenozoic scenes (absent from the murals, which cut off at the Cretaceous). The mammal scenes in the book (discussed by me here) are as open and vibrant as this piece, while the dinosaur scenes are more dark, swampy and oppressive… I can’t help but see this as a deliberate choice, to make the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic a more hostile and scary world compared to the Cenozoic, serving a “march of progress” narrative. Whichever the case, I find the mural version more pleasant to look at. She may have a steadier hand in the book, but the mural version has more depth to it, and it’s also more fun.
It’s well established at this point that Marie, like so many artists, would quite often base her reconstructions of extinct animals on earlier works by others. Charles Knight was chief among these, but she also copies from Gerhard Heilmann, Otto Jaekel and Othenio Abel. The latter was an especially problematic figure (this is an understatement) and I’m sure there was no love lost between Marie and him, but one has to get one’s references wherever one can.

Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus
The sauropods all represent different genera. Front to back, we have Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus and Brontosaurus slightly to the right. As is to be expected from an early 20th century piece, they are all wading in the water. The Brachiosaurus in particular is based on Othenio Abel, while I believe the Brontosaurus to be partially based on Knight. It’s interesting how inconsistent Marie is with the detailing. The heads of Diplodocus and Camarasaurus (which had known skulls at the time) are quite detailed and recognizable, while those of Brachiosaurus and Brontosaurus (which didn’t) are less so and a bit more muddled. The patterning on the front two sauropods, with playful dark markings on a light background, is very cool. I believe it can be traced back to some late 19th century sketches by Charles Knight of the sauropod Amphicoelias.
I love the amount of detail in the background. Looking past the sauropods, we can see the background scene being dominated by Stegosaurus, again based on Abel, with their tall backs, unruly-looking parallel plates and four-point thagomizers. Their skin texture is especially interesting, looking either very pebbly or even quilled. This has all carried over from Abel’s original. The second Stegosaurus is moving away from the viewer, showing its tail, but Marie has chosen to give it less emphasis.
Here and there, more creatures can be made out. Brightly coloured Archeopteryx, crocodile looking critters by the water and hard-to-make-out animals over by the lake in the far background. And, of course, tons of pterosaurs in the sky. As they all have long tails, I suppose they are meant to be Rhamphorhynchus. The attention to detail increases the impact of the piece as a whole. The work really rewards looking at it again and again, finding new delightful little details.
Even more impressive is the landscape and especially the vegetation. It’s incredible to contemplate just how many hours Marie must have spent at her custom-built work shed in Doorn. It’s full of depth. Restoring it must have been a heck of a job.
To the right on the background of the Jurassic side, we can make out some theropods. Allosaurus is hunched over its carcass, as was the case with Knight. The original Allosaurus mount at the AMNH was posed like that, Knight copied the pose in his influential 1919 piece and so did tons of other artists; Rudolph Zallinger and Giovanni Caselli are later examples. Hubrecht’s version follows Knight’s quite closely.
Standing behind it is Ceratosaurus, looking considerably stranger. Knight himself had not yet done a Ceratosaurus piece at this time, but competent illustrations of Ceratosaurus at this time had been produced by the likes of Joseph Smit, Alice Woodward, Frank Bond and Joseph Gleeson. It seems Marie had seen none of them; the creature resembles no other piece I’m familiar with. It doesn’t even resemble the Marsh skeletal very closely. Put bluntly, it’s ridiculous. It has a bizarre round head with a hilarious grin, a hunched, humanoid stance and a razor back. It’s quite funny, but perhaps a bit revealing of how lost Marie was reconstructing dinosaurs when there was no good reference material available.
The excellent restoration work has made many things visible such as the sauropods on the beach in the far background and the strange reptile directly below Allosaurus. Next to it is a tailless pterosaur, which must be meant to be Pterodactylus. Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs can be seen in the water.
Here’s that sea. Art of animals such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, to use as reference material, was more readily available compared to the dinosaurs; knowledge of marine reptiles was about a century ahead of the dinosaurs. Some of the oldest 19th century palaeoart is of marine reptiles, but Marie does not quote from this body of work indiscriminately. She was very keen on keeping up to date with current science. I must admit I have some blind spots where it comes to palaeoart of marine reptiles, and pterosaurs too for that matter. The large Pteranodon in the upper right is traced from Othenio Abel again, and in the other Pteranodon further down I recognize a more up-to-date version of Robert Child. No doubt more animals here can be sourced to other works. Please comment if you recognize some more.
We often talk of monsterization in the context of modern-day palaeoart, but monsterization was equally if not more present in the palaeoart of the 19th century. The trend with marine reptiles especially was to turn them into monstrous, antediluvian sea-serpents, endlessly locked in draconic battles. Marie Hubrecht’s early 20th century work represents a move away from this monsterization. Stylized though her work is, the creatures remain animals first. In that way, her work can be said to be naturalistic.
Marie also offers us a view beneath the waves. Her underwater scenes are always very crowded, colourful and complex. The central animal here is the plesiosaur grabbing the belemnite. It would not surprise me if this is based on another pre-existing piece, though I don’t know for sure. Other than that, just a dazzling menagerie of fish, ammonites and invertebrates, with what appears to be a modern swordfish (intended to be an ichthyosaur, perhaps?) and a shark mixed in. The coral and water plants add even more colour and detail.
A well known quirk of Marie’s underwater scenes is that she tends to have her ammonites swimming upside down, with their little tentacled faces poking out of the top of their shell, rather than the bottom. The white ammonite seen on the right here is an exception. In the later book, this has been mostly corrected. Maybe an expert corrected her in the meantime. I also never cease to be impressed by the variety of ammonites Marie puts on display, a variety not seen again until Prehistoric Planet 2 came along. If you look at Verdwenen Werelden, you’ll see that she absolutely intended every single animal depicted to be a specific species. She was extremely deliberate in what she was doing.
Back up to the surface we go, into the Cretaceous. Again, we have a lot of details to unpack. Marie’s work on the flora impresses as much as the animals. This scene was adapted into Verdwenen Werelden as two separate pieces, with one showing Triceratops, Corythosaurus and several ankylosaurs, another showing Iguanodon, Trachodon and Tyrannosaurus. And once more, I can’t help but feel the mural is the superior work. It’s much more colourful and exuberant, and also shows off more of Marie’s irresistible idiosyncrasies.
We might as well start with that hadrosaur. I bet you’ve been waiting for me to talk about it since I’ve shown you the full canvas. Along with Ceratosaurus, this is probably the most singularly bizarre inhabitant of the entire painting. Artists often take the “duckbill”-aspect of hadrosaurs far too literally, but Hubrecht has really gone overboard at making it a literal duckbill. This is only the beginning, as the entire shape and posture of the creature is highly unusual even for the time. It certainly does not closely resemble the Trachodon pieces by Charles Knight. The shape of the head, sloped backwards like an exaggerated duck, is very unusual. The tail doesn’t look very dinosaurian at all. It’s rather short and lizard-like and doesn’t look like it could support the animal’s weight, as it was still supposed to do at this time. Most interesting of all is the animals integument, with pebbly dinosaur scales on its arms and belly and some sort of feathery or even fuzzy coat from the back of its head, covering the entire back, up to the tail. I’ve seen this creature being described as “Donald Duck” but it’s so much stranger than that. I love how it’s painted, with the subtle stippling giving it so much character. Note the little details of green in its red head.
Unlike Trachodon, the Triceratops has been copied pretty much wholesale from Charles Knight. By comparison, it looks dull, proving that Hubrecht’s own outlandish creations are at least more interesting to look at than her copycatting. She has given Triceratops her own touch in the strange, interesting, patchy colour pattern absent from the 1904 Knight piece. Its back almost looks like a turtle’s shell.
The other prominent dinosaurs are the Iguanodon, running although they have no space to run. These hold up especially well to modern standards, having a dynamic pose and their tails straight out off the ground. They are based on the work of Gerhard Heilmann, who throughout his life made several versions of his running Iguanodon. Heilmann was a progressive palaeoartist, willing to engage in speculation. He was known to be an adopter of the strange, now disproven hypothesis that Iguanodon could stick its tongue out through a hole in its lower jaw, though he stopped supporting this view in his later work. His older Iguanodon pieces have the creature retain a, once again very literal, iguana-like appearance. That carries over into Hubrecht’s version. Her animals have literal iguana colours and little iguana-like details, like little spikes along the necks and backs and very lizardlike ears. As Heilmann continued to update his Iguanodon, so followed Hubrecht; the Iguanodon in Verdwenen Werelden have lost most of the iguana-like details.
I want to zoom in on some details. Standing in the room, I didn’t notice there were ankylosaurs in the piece until I’d stared at it for a long time. Two rather armadillo-like ankylosaurs are seen to the top left of Triceratops, low in detail but possibly based on a Palaeoscincus piece by one E. M. Fulda. Palaeoscincus is a wastebasket taxon that has fallen into disuse. To the right, we have a slightly more discernable Polacanthus, and this one seems to be inspired by Alice Woodward. This is a surprise to me as I see no other Woodward influence in Marie’s work anywhere. The orange and dark green Struthiomimus is an unusual addition.
I also want to draw your attention to the snake, and to the seabirds on the coast. They are hard to make out, but they seem to be either penguins or auks. Or are they Ichthyornis?
Hidden away in the top right corner of the painting, we can spot Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s a very different version than the upright, Godzilla-like monster that shows up in Verdwenen Werelden. Unlike that version, this one has a Knightian aspect to it with the patterning similar to the sauropods. It is nowhere near as grotesque as the book version; Marie manages to downplay its monstrosity here. Its inclusion is almost an easter egg.
The casqued dinosaur below T. rex is either Corythosaurus or Oviraptor – I suspect the former as it was better known at the time, and it also appears in Verdwenen Werelden, though again looking very different. This one looks quite obviously like a cassowary, even though Marie has given it another duck bill. In between the hadrosaurs, we can spot the silhouettes of two arboreal creatures, likely Hypsilophodon.
But this end of the canvas is dominated by that beautiful tree. I wonder what reference material Marie used for her vegetation. It could be photographs, or other paintings of forests, trees and plants. The jungle in the background of the Cretaceous side is wonderfully lush and dense, a contrast to the open lake view in the back of the Jurassic side. You can even find some animals in there if you look closely. This is one of the reasons Hubrecht is so rewarding; with every look, you see more.
That’s as long as I’ve ever spent talking about just one painting! But it’s worth it, right? What a wonderful, joyous piece of palaeoart. Come to Amsterdam and go see it! That said, I think this will do for today. Will I spend as long dissecting every other one of Marie’s seven Amsterdam paintings? Not likely, though we’re still going to give them all a good look. Marie Hubrecht will return! And before we go, let me give the last word to Dicky, who has written this loving ode to Marie Hubrecht.
4 Comments
Jakob Schlumpf
December 29, 2024 at 9:22 pmThe mosasaur in the upper-right portion of the sea seems to line up almost exactly with a Tylosaurus painted by Knight for the AMNH.
The pair of running iguanodon also appear to be traced over a Gerhard Heilmann engraving, except Hubrecht’s version seems strangely more iguana-esque than Heilmann’s, the latter being much more accurate to the real animal (and looking less like a bipedal sprinting lizard).
Grant Harding
January 10, 2025 at 11:02 amThe Ceratosaurus looks furry!
Amber
January 20, 2025 at 12:15 amDefinitely a Corythosaurus at the end – she evidently traced it over the mummy from the AMNH, or someone else that had done so.
Andreas Johansson
January 20, 2025 at 2:20 amI’m not sure what’s cod about the Latin?